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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



PHILOSOPHY 



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English Literature 



A COURSE OF LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE 
LOWELL INSTITUTE 



BY 



JOHN BASCOM 

Author of " Principles of Psychology," " Science, Philosophy and 
Religion," " ^Esthetics " 







NEW YORK 
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

FOURTH AVENUE AND TWENTY-THIRD STREET 
1874. 



TIT a- 1 
•33 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 

JOHN BASCOM, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



'HE MIDDLETON STEREOTYPE COMPANY, 
GREENPORT, LONG ISLAND. 



PREFACE. 



There are, in each department of knowledge, 
central facts and germinant principles. If we reach 
these early and well, the labors of acquisition are 
greatly lightened. They serve to explain to the 
mind, and to hold for the memory, those multitudi- 
nous minor facts which otherwise confuse the 
one and burden the other. It is a secret of wise 
acquisition, to learn the most in learning the least, 
and we do this by directing attention at once to 
leading, fruitful facts. The ground is thus outlined ; 
we know where to look for particulars ; and these, 
as they come to us by direct search, or as incidents 
of growing information, fall at once into their place, 
strengthen our general hold of truth, and are them- 
selves securely rolled in and bound up in the com- 
pact bundle of knowledge. 

The object of the lectures herewith published is 
to put the general reader and the student of Eng- 
lish Literature into early possession of the leading 
influences operative in it, and thus to enable them 
to peruse and to study its numerous productions 
with more insight, more pleasure, a better mastery 
of relations, and a more ready retention of facts. 
A net-work of forces are here given, which, cover- 
ing the entire field, may enable them easily to in- 

(iii) 



IV PREFACE. 

close and attach the ideas each day furnished in 
this range of knowledge. We have termed our 
work a Philosophy of English Literature, as indica- 
ting a discussion of causes, of controlling tenden- 
cies, and leading minds, rather than a presentation 
of details, a reproduction of facts in their chrono- 
logical connections. 

A class pursuing English literature by the aid 
of text-books like Craik's, Shaw's, Spalding's, 
Angus', Gilman's, might, we believe, carry on a 
review to advantage in connection with these lec- 
tures. The last impression would thus be one 
more organic and living than that ordinarily 
reached. 

It is not necessary to suppose what is said in 
these lectures is wholly proportionate, or entirely 
sufficient, in order that the student may, by means 
of it, reach the end here proposed. It will be 
enough if the lines of thought struck out, and the 
considerations brought forward, are those which in- 
terlace and occupy the field. Each reader will then 
easily make such additions and modifications as his 
own mind suggests, and the facts before him seem 
to require. We have followed freely the bent of 
our own thoughts, and our conclusions therefore 
will not be found exactly parallel with those which 
others are reaching. If they provoke question, 
they may not for that reason be less valuable, pro- 
vided the discussion leads to a better insight into* 
principles. 



CONTENTS 



INITIATIVE PERIOD. 

LAST HALF OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

Lecture I. Page. 

Three Forms of Value in Literature 2 

The Chief Element, the Emotional One 3 

Mere Thought, Secondary 4 

Definition of English Literature 5 

Influence of Ethical Sentiment 6 

Literature, How to be Treated 8 

The National Character 9 

Its Two Constituents 10 

Character of the Normans 1 1 

Their Points of Superiority (a) Arms (b) Cultivation (c) 

Religion 13 

Relation of Normans and Saxons 14 

Growing Unity between them 15 

English Character 17 

Foreign Influences 18 

(1) Classical 19 

(2) Italian 20 

(3) Norman 21 

The Romances are Interesting to us, Why 22 

Minstrels 23 

Summary 24 

Lecture II. 

Home Influences 26 

(1) Religious Forces •. 27 

The Characters of the Canterbury Tales 28 

Contradictions in Religious Characters 31 

(v) 






VI CONTENTS. 

Page. 

Two Irritations (a) of Ethical Sense 32 

(&) Of Common Sense 33 

Friar and Summoner 34 

(2) Social Forces 34 

Chivalry, Character of 35 

Effects of 36 

Influence on Women 37 

Pride of English 38 

Relation of Leader and Retainer 39 

Condition of the Working Classes 40 

Character of Women 41 

Effects of the Times upon them 42 

Action of the Church toward Woman 43 

Licentiousness of Language 44 

(3) Language 45 

Elements of the English Language 46 

(4) Forms of Literature 48 

Poetry precedes Prose 49 

Sir John Mandeville, Wicliffe 50 

Lecture III. 

Chaucer 51 

His Character 5 2 

The First National Poet 53 

His Indebtedness to Piers Ploughman 54 

His Free, Political Spirit » 55 

Progressive in Poetry 56 

, Allegory 57 

His Dramatic Power 59 

His Humor and Pathos 60 

His Sensuality 61 

His Love of Nature 62 

The Poet not a Reformer 63 

RETROGRESSIVE PERIOD. 

THE FIFTEENTH, AND FIRST HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH, CENTURY. 

Due to 

( 1 ) Repression of Inquiry 65 

(2) Civil Wars 66 



CONTENTS. Vll 

Page. 

Effects of the Wars of the Roses 67 

Introduction of Printing 67 

Barrenness of the Times 68 

FIRST CREATIVE PERIOD. 

THE LAST PORTION OF THE SIXTEENTH, AND THE FIRST PORTION 
OF THE SEVENTEENTH, CENTURY. 

The Weight of the Ethical Element 69 

Lecture IV. — General Infiicences at work in the Creative 
Period. 

(1) Activity of Religious Sentiment 75 

Political Events affected by it 76 

Domestic Events affected by it .- 77 

Effect of the English Bible on Literature 78 

Various Versions 80 

Theological Composition 81 

Polemics and Literature 82 

Prose style 84 

Hooker 85 

(2) Revival of Classical Learning 85 

Diversity of Effects .' 86 

(3) Growth of Science 88 

Bacon 89 

(4) Geographical Discovery 92 

(5.) Invention 93 

Printing 94 

Gunpowder 95 

Special Influences at work in this period. 

(1) Classical Scholarship in England __ 96 

(2) Italian Scholarship 96 

Surrey 97 

(3) Peaceful Reign of Elizabeth 98 

(4) Chivalrous Spirit of her Court 98 

(5) Social State 98 

(6) Branches of Literature 100 

Themes of Poetry 101 

Lecture V. 

Influences of Climate 102 



VI 11 CONTENTS. 

Page. 

Power of Individuals 105 

Spenser 

His Character 106 

Faery Queen 108 

An Allegorical Poem 109 

A Narrative Poem no 

Its Length 112 

A Religious Poem 113 

A Poem for Poets 114 

English Drama 114 

Historic Rise 117 

Shakespeare 

His Rank 1 18 

His Power 119 

His Relation to Art ' 121 

J His English Character 122 

His Relation to Morality 124 

Lecture VI. 

Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, contrasted 128 

Milton, his Puritanic Sentiments 129 

Periods in his Life 130 

His Style 131 

Paradise Lost 132 

Criticisms on it 133 

Milton as belonging to the Elizabethan Era 134 

FIRST TRANSITION PERIOD. 

LAST PORTION OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

Reformatory Periods Critical 136 

Puritan Character 137 

Transitional Features 

(1) Conflict of parties 138 

The Drama, its Debasement 140 

Causes of the Degeneracy of the Theatre 

[a) Monetary Influences 142 

(6) Moral Influences 142 

.(c) Cultivation of Scenic Effects 143 

(a') Unfitness for High Sentiment 144 

(2) Conflict of French and English Tastes 14-5 



CONTENTS. IX 

Page. 

English and French Character 146 

(3) Conflict of Creative and Critical Tendencies 148 

Dryden 149 

His Character 150 

Subservient to his Times 15 1 

His Moral Weakness 152 

Estimate of his Works 153 

Lecture VII. 

FIRST CRITICAL PERIOD, 

INCLUDING THE EARLY AND MIDDLE PORTIONS OF THE EIGH- 
TEENTH CENTURY. 

Balance of the Creative and the Critical Periods 155 

Form and Substance 156 

Pope Aimed at Formal Correctness 157 

Value of the Results 158 

Opinions held of Pope as a Poet 159 

Rank of his Poetry- 160 

Poetry and Prose of the Period 162 

Causes at Work to Produce the Period 

(i) Criticism naturally follows Invention 163 

(2) French Influence 164 

(3) Classical Influence 165 

(4) Science 166 

(5) Political and Social Spirit of the Pe?'iod 168 

Political Parties 169 

Improvement in Morals 1 70 

The Papers of Steele 171 

Their Purpose 172 

Their Qualities 173 

The Moral Element in Addison 175 

Leadership 176 

Swift 178 

Pope 179 

Steele 179 

Addison 1 80 

Lecture VIII. 

Second Phase of the Critical Period 182 

Relation in it of Prose and Poetry 183 



X CONTENTS. 

Page. 

Differences between the First and Second Phases ; 184 

(a) Pre-eminence of Prose (6) Influence of Johnson 185 

Style of Johnson 187 

(i) Growth of Prose 190 

Theology and Philosophy 191 

Political Science and History 193 

Oratory 196 

Rhetoric and the Novel 197 

(2) Influence of Johnson .... 199 

Personal Qualities 200 

Reputation 202 

Critical Powers 203 

His Control 206 

Lecture IX. 

SECOND TRANSITION PERIOD. 

LAST PORTION OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

Relation of Periods 209 

Three Periods in our Literature stand in natural Sequence 2*0 

Akenside 213 

Thomson 214 

Gray, Collins 216 

Cowper 217 

His Relation to the Coming Era 218 

His Traits 219 

His Devotion 220 

Burns 221 

The Slight Hold on him of Conventional Forces 222 

The Influences making way for a New Era 223 

(1) Interest in Early English Poetry 223 

Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 224 

(2) German Influence 225 

Relation in Thought, of Germany, France, and England . . 226 

Value in Philosophy of a Practical Bent 227 

(3) Political Rights and Liberty 230 

American Revolution 230 

French Revolution 23 1 

Effects on different Persons 232 

(4) Philosophy and Theology 233 

Coleridge 233 



CONTENTS. XI 

Page. 

France and England 234 

(5) Convergence of Tendencies 235 

Lecture X. 

SECOND CREATIVE PERIOD. 

FIRST PORTION OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

Contrasted with the First Creative Period 237 

Poetry, its Predominating Feature 238 

The Influence of Men of Genius 238 

Spencer's View 239 

Taine's View 240 

The Relation of Individual and National Life 241 

Walter Scott 246 

His Powers 247 

His Personal Character 248 

Byron 249 

His Character 250 

His Works 251 

His Immorality 252 

Coleridge 254 

A Philosopher, Poet and Critic 254 

His Conversational Powers 255 

His Influence 256 

Wordsworth ' 257 

His Relation to Poetry 258 

His Relation to Political Questions 260 

His Powers 261 

Shelley 262 

His Purpose 263 

Lecture XI. 

PERIOD OF DIFFUSION. 
THE present. 

Opening of the Last Three Centuries 265 

The Present a Period of Prose 266 

One of Diffusion 267 

Science, History 268 

The Novel and the Newspaper, Chief Features 269 

The Novel, its Office 270 



Xll CONTENTS. 

Page. 

A Classification of Novels 271 

Its Excellencies 275 

The Superiority of Our Time in this Respect 277 

The A T ewspaper 278 

Amount of Circulation 279 

(a) Favors the Rapid Solution of Social Questions 280 

(b) Tends. to the Vigor, Soundness, and Candor, of Public 

Opinion , 282 

Sobriety of Judgment of the English Race 283 

(c) A Chief Resistance to Corruption 285 

(d) Affects Beneficially Public Education and the Pulpit.. 285 

(e) Diffuses the Influence of Cities 286 

The Evils of the Press, Social and Literary 287 

Criticism 289 

Lecture XII. 

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY. 

Terms Defined ' 292 

Line of Descent in English Philosophy 293 

The Source of Knowledge taken as the Central Idea 293 

Bacon 294 

Hobbes 296 

Cudworth 297 

Locke 297 

Shaftesbury 300 

Clarke, Berkeley 301 

Hartley, Priestley 302 

Hume 304 

Llis view of Miracles 308 

Paley, Bentham, Bain 309 

Mackintosh, Whewell , 311 

Spencer 311 

The Mills 312 

The Leading Conclusions of the English School of Phi- 
losophy 313 

The Scottish School 314 

Reid 314 

Hamilton 315 

Rejection of the word, Materialism, by the English School 316 

The Contradictions of this School 317 



THE PHILOSOPHY 

OF 

ENGLISH LITEEATTTBE. 



LECTURE I. 



Literature. — Its Essential Characteristics. — Variable Use of the 
Word. — The Initiative Period in English Literature. — Last half 
of Fourteenth Century the Date of the English Nation, Lan- 
guage and Literature. — Anglo-Saxon Element. — Norman Ele- 
ment. — Norman Superiority. — Early Relation of the Two. — 
Causes which United Them. — English Character. — Foreign In- 
fluences : First, Classical ; Second, Italian ; Third, Norman. 

The literature of a nation is the embodiment of 
that which is most artistic and complete in its intel- 
lectual, literary life. There are many practical 
products of composition, records, chronicles, works 
of instruction, of science, and of reference, which 
contain the material of knowledge, the raw staple 
of art, but are not literature. These change with 
succeeding years, and reappear in altered and en- 
larged forms, as the progress of events and investi- 
gation determine. Many books, in each generation, 
are the seed which is returned to the soil as the 
condition of farther increase. No work is a part of 
national literature, in its more specific sense, till it 
is possessed of such merit of execution, aside from 

(i) 



2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

mere matter, or it were better to say in conjunction 
with matter, as to give it permanent value. Thought 
alone, the substance of wisdom merely, cannot 
save a work to literature. It may be rather the oc- 
casion of its speedy disappearance. More skilful 
laborers will swarm around the sweet morsel, let 
fall as it were in the highway of thought, and each 
bear off a portion of the unidentified product. It is 
some completeness, symmetry, excellence of form 
that gives identity, ownership to a product ; and a 
permanent interest in its careful, exact preservation. 

There are in literature three forms of value, an 
intellectual, an emotional and an expressional one. 
The thought-value is the most stable, residuary ele- 
ment; the emotional and expressional values are 
the constituents most changeable and volatile. 
These two are thoroughly interdependent, and ac- 
cording as merit passes to this end of the scale, is 
the literary excellence of a work declared. 

Thought as thought is saved, no matter how often 
it is altered in expression, and reappears in new re- 
lations. Form alone, in subtile fellowship with 
emotional power, necessitates careful transmission. 
Gold as bullion waits momentarily on the arts for 
working up ; stamped as coin, or wrought as orna- 
ment, it has a new character, an enhanced value, 
that everywhere attend upon it, and guard it. 

In proportion as the excellence of the form 
transcends the value of the matter, does the literary 
work gain perpetuity. The poems of Shakespeare 
and Milton hold their present position, not from any 
new truths they announce, not from facts of history 



FORM IN LITERATURE. 3 

or of science they contain, but through the superior, 
inimitable workmanship which belongs to them. 
Material, for the most part fanciful, thus acquires 
an interest, and receives an estimate, that fall to no 
records of history, no facts of science, however val- 
uable these may be. Indeed, in proportion as the 
very substance of a literary work, the thought it 
contains, becomes important, is it difficult for it to 
claim and hold a place in literature. The material 
of history in so large a measure confers upon it its 
value, that each succeeding work, the product of 
more investigation, tends to displace preceding 
ones ; and only rare excellencies of style can keep 
the early historian in possession of the national 
mind. The very interest of the facts stated stimu- 
lates farther inquiry, and this pushes into the back- 
ground those who first contributed to it. The hard 
workers, the investigators and compilers, in the 
fields of knowledge, descend by genesis only to 
those who come after them ; their discoveries, their 
theories, like wind-sown flowers, enrich many who 
are ignorant of their origin. 

Literature, then, is essentially of an artistic 
character ; poetry is its chief product ; and all its 
creations hold their ground by completeness and 
beauty of form. The material is as often imagina- 
tive as historical, and must, even in the essay, get 
its peculiar character and coloring from the mind 
of the writer. There must be in the literary work, 
as in the crystal, something which cannot be broken 
in on without loss, something in itself specific and 
final. It is, in fact, the individual mind which the 



4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

nation treasures up in literature ; and he who has 
only common truths, that which is or may be the 
spoil of all, to bring, can find no entrance to this 
gallery of art. His contributions are valuable, but 
they have other and coarser storehouses than those 
in which beauty garners her own. He must bear his 
useful things to the markets in which like products 
are bought and sold. 

There seems, at first, something a little unequal 
and harsh in this, that the patient laborer is so ea- 
sily thrust back by the artist, he who gives bread 
by him who gives visions ; yet we are willing to ac- 
cept it as one more proof that spiritualities, inspira- 
tions, creative touches, though they be mere traces 
of light, are more to man than the solid, coarse- 
grained comforts of being. Those who bring us 
these fare as servants, and those who fling care- 
lessly to us those rarer gifts are sought after, and 
entertained as angels ; yet at times a little too 
much on the light food of posthumous praise. 

The word literature is determined in its breadth 
by its connections. When we speak of the litera- 
ture of one department of knowledge, as chemistry, 
the artistic quality is comparatively overlooked, and 
all works of merit that have been written on the 
subject are included. If we refer to the literature 
of a particular century, as of the sixteenth century 
in England, we then gather up in the word more 
carefully all the literary products of that period, 
though some of them may since have sunk out of 
sight. In the words, English literature, we should 
comprise only those works whose artistic merit has 



DEFINITION OF LITERATURE. 5 

put them in permanent possession of the mind of 
the nation ; which hold on their way, not through 
years, but through centuries. Yet few even of 
these would reappear in the world's literature, as 
working for themselves an abiding-place in the edu- 
cated thought of different nations. While the w T ord, 
therefore, is always inclining towards merit of form, 
and the more with each extension of it, the theme, 
the time and the territory in which the literary suc- 
cess has been achieved are indicated by the qualify- 
ing adjective, and our definition becomes a conjoint 
one. English literature is made up of those Eng- 
lish writings which have gained a permanent place 
in the regard of the English people. This position 
has been won by artistic excellence, and hence our 
literature is, in letters, our national art-gallery. 
The broader the field which the collection covers, 
the more select are its constituents ; while restric- 
tion in time or place makes lighter the conditions 
of admission. 

We have pushed this point clearly out, that the 
pleasures of literature are essentially aesthetic, be- 
cause it will aid us in a just estimate of the merits 
of English literature, and of the forces which have 
affected it. We hold it to be a general truth, that 
moral influences, the ethical tone of sentiment, the 
spiritually perceptive powers are pre-eminently united 
to works of literary art. This seems to follow from 
the fact, that nothing mounts into the region of art 
without undergoing some transformation, receiving 
buoyancy and color from the mind that wings it for 
flight. Art is not literal, is not commonplace, mere 



6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

copy; but owes much to selection, arrangement, 
infused character and infused life. Now this in- 
fusion which goes mantling through the new, the 
beautiful product is the intellectual, spiritual life 
and movement of the artist ; and as the artist him- 
self is known in his temper and moods by their re- 
lationjo the supreme element of his nature, to the 
ethical temperature of his own soul, so are his 
works. What the light is to the landscape,. grading 
it in its every degree of emotion, lifting it up to the 
key-note of highest joy and exultation ; or depress- 
ing it to the deepest sadness and unmingled fear ; 
or leaving it in the midway region of commonplace 
comforts ; that is the moral revelation to the liter- 
ary work, revealing men, revealing things and 
thoughts even, under a sportive and jocular, a se- 
rene and reflective, or a stern and portentous aspect, 
according to the soul that is in it. We are not to 
be understood, of course, as restricting the word 
ethical to precepts of conduct, more or less numer- 
ous, but rather as referring by it to that tacit dec- 
laration which every man makes of the nature of 
life, its delights, its insights, its achievements ; and 
of the ministrations of God, society and nature to it. 
The soul of man is centred in his. moral constitu- 
tion ; that is in his perceptions of the objects and 
forms, and hence of the beauties, of rational action. 
He can gain no orbit of thought ; he can reach not 
even the conventional excellencies of character, the 
courage of manhood, the gentleness of womanhood; 
he can give no interpretation to the voices of na- 
ture, save as he does it by one or more of those 



INFLUENCE OF ETHICAL ELEMENT. 7 

ethical sentiments that spring from the depths of 
his being, that belong to him as man, under larger 
joys, and severer sufferings, and sterner laws and 
more enduring hopes than those which fall to the 
animals about him. As man sinks in action, in 
emotion, in intuition, he loses high art; as he as- 
cends he regains it, effecting a new entrance into 
that which is peculiar to himself, to a moral being 
with springs and laws of life hidden in its superiorly 
perceptive constitution. Even comedy cannot 
thrive on mere trifles. Unless its laugh has elation, 
election, taste, sense and sensibility in it, it sinks 
to low burlesque, in which the animal appetites so 
predominate, that we find ourselves in action and 
impulse facing downward toward the brute. The 
poet Schiller seems to have been possessed of this 
principle in a more tense form than we have ven- 
tured on. " There was in him," says his biograph- 
er, " a singular ardor for truth, a solemn conviction 
of the duties of a poet, a deep-rooted idea on which 
we have been more than once called to insist, that 
the minstrel should be a preacher. That song 
is the sister of religion in its largest sense ; that 
the stage is the pulpit to all sects, all nations, all 
time." * The difference between men is great ; it 
lies here. To one nothing is religious which is not 
coldly, formally preceptive ; to another nothing fails 
of religion, which at all reaches the heart. It is, 
then, of English literature in its associated artistic 
and ethical forces, of necessity gathering strength 
and beauty from that which is in man most beauti- 
* " Bibliotheca Sacra," Oct. No., 1871, p. 716. 



8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

fill and strong, that we are to speak. If it has been 
at times like a tropical forest, infested by a rank 
undergrowth of briars, we may be sure it was be- 
cause the hot and reeking atmosphere engendered 
them, entering in to obstruct and hide the majestic 
life above them. 

It is not our purpose to give the facts of English 
literature, we shall assume a general knowledge of 
them, and strive to trace their dependence. We 
shall start with the earliest works of pronounced 
merit in our literary history, and shall speak of au- 
thors only as their productions are themselves a 
distinct force, giving character to the periods under 
discussion. 

The initiative period in English letters covers 
the last half of the fourteenth century. Literary pe- 
riods have no definite bounds. As the slopes of 
mountains may gently rise and gently descend 
again to the plains beyond, leaving their midway 
line and general trend to be determined by isolated 
peaks and bold ridges ; so periods in literature are 
defined, not by definite dates, but by persons scat- 
tered through them, characteristic tendencies that 
stretch across them. 

The initiative period was one of vigorous poetic 
life, whose chief representative was Chaucer. In 
an effort to understand this introductory era, we 
shall need to inquire into the national character, 
into the foreign and domestic influences prevalent, 
and into the traits of individuals whose productions 
constitute its chief intellectual strength. The na- 
tional and the individual elements can never be 



NATIONAL CHARACTER. 9 

separated in literature, nor do they maintain any 
uniform ratio to each other. In writers of ordinary 
power, the conditions under which they compose 
their works exert a controlling influence ; in writers 
of genius, this influence, though still felt, is over- 
shadowed by personal qualities. The direction and 
general character of their labor may be settled by 
external inducements, but its method of accomplish- 
ment is to be referred to their own powers. Our 
first inquiry is into national character. It is through 
those general conditions which surround and en- 
velop the individual, and whose force he cannot but 
feel, either in assent or dissent, that we at length 
approach the seat of art in the soul of the artist. 

An English nationality, like an English lan- 
guage and an English literature, was beginning to 
appear in the last half of the fourteenth century. 
The three sprang up together ; they had one birth, 
nationality, language and literature ; and held in 
union the same elements. The root of our language 
is Saxon. It has furnished, though in connection 
with revolutionary changes, the grammatical frame- 
work of our speech. The foreign tongue, which for 
a time overlay and at length largely melted into 
our language, saturating it with its vocabulary so 
far as one language can be saturated by another, 
was -Norman French. 

So too the nation, in bulk and staple Anglo- 
Saxon, was permeated, inter-penetrated, injected 
everywhere with Normans, first as rulers, afterward 
as leaders and fellow-subjects. The popular lit- 
erature, hitherto chiefly Norman, began, as the 
i* 



10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

fourteenth century drew to an end, to be English 
in form and theme. 

The two elements, then, in English nationality, 
of very unequal prevalence and unlike characteris- 
tics, were the Saxon and the Norman. The first J 
remained throughout, the substance into which the 
second, as a color or quality, was received ; consti- 
tuted the material shaped by the latter into new 
forms, and enlarged into new offices. The Saxon 
character, though less brilliant and dominant than 
the Norman, was superior to it in patient strength. 
The Anglo-Saxon, of low German origin, seems 
to have possessed the qualities which belong to his 
kinsmen of the continent. Known abroad as Sax- 
ons, early spoken of by themselves as Angles or 
English, they have, in the more careful historic 
use of the present, been designated as Anglo-Sax- 
ons. For six hundred years they had held by ex- 
tirpation and expulsion, rather than by conquest, of 
its inhabitants, the lamer share of Britain, leaving 
to the Celts the mountains of the west and north. 
At the time of the Norman conquest, they were 
possessed of less enterprise and less cultivation 
than their invaders ; but more equality, greater lib- 
erty, and the hardihood of stubborn strength. Their 
rights were ill-defined, as those of a rude, independ- 
ent people are wont to be ; but centuries were re- 
quired after the conquest to win again for the gen- 
eral voice of the nation the influence that fell to it 
under the Saxon constitution. The sturdy array 
of foot-soldiers and the heavy battle-axes with 
which they met the horsemen and bowmen of the 



NORMANS. 1 1 

Normans presented in a visible form their tough, 
unyielding temper. 

The Normans were in many respects the reverse 
of the Saxons. These had occupied England for 
six centuries by displacement, with comparatively 
slight alterations of character and language. The 
Normans, in less than a third of that time, gained 
in the north of France, a new speech, and gave rise 
to a new national development. They did not, as 
the Saxons, expel and exclude those whom they in- 
vaded, but included them in a fresh life. , Not only 
did they become a leading element in the formation 
of the French monarchy and people ; that portion 
of them which was transferred to England, in a 
period but little longer, accepted new conditions, 
again changed their language, and once more gath- 
ered, with vigorous, organizing force, a new, diverse 
and independent nation. 

"Above all men," says one, "the Norman was 
an imitator, and therefore an improver; and it was 
precisely because he was the least rigid, most sup- 
ple, plastic and accommodating of mortals, that he 
became the civilizer and ruler wherever he was 
thrown. In France he became French; in Eng- 
land, English ; in Italy, Italian ; in Novgorod, Rus- 
sian. * * * Wherever his neighbors invented 
or possessed anything worthy of admiration, the 
sharp, inquisitive Norman poked his aquiline nose. 
► Wherever what we now call the march of intellect 
advanced, there was the sharp, eager face of the 
Norman in the van. He always intermarried with 
the people among whom he settled, borrowed its 



12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

language, adopted its customs, reconciled himself 
to its laws, and confirmed the aristocracy of con- 
quest, by representing, while elevating, the charac- 
ter of the people with whom he closely identified 
himself." * t 

We give, as another illustration of the flexibili- 
ty of Norman character, the control soon gained 
over the Irish by those to whom lands were appor- 
tioned on the first invasion by Henry II. This 
Norman nobility became rapidly Irish in character, 
outstripping native chiefs in indigenous traits, won 
an easy and complete ascendancy over the primitive 
population, and were cordially sustained by them 
in later rebellions against English rule. " Some 
most powerful families rooted themselves in the 
soil, and never forsook it ; the Geraldines, of Mini- 
ster and Kildare; the Butlers, of Kilkenny; the De 
Burghs, the Birminghams, the De Courcies. This 
complete absorption of the Norman into the char- 
acter, customs, feuds, revolts of the Irish was ex- 
pressed in the phrase ' Ipsis Hibernis Hiberniores.'f 
It was this subtile, diffusive, adaptable, and spirited 
element that was infused by the conquest into the 
sluggish, phlegmatic Saxon society ; and became 
the nervous system in the body politic, with wide- 
awake senses and a rapid interchange of influences, 
calling to instant service and active subjection the 
solid bone and brawny muscle which composed the 
staple of English strength. 

* The Examiner, for 1848, as given in Stephen's " Literature 
of the Kymry," p. 429. 

\ Froucle's " History of England," vol. ii. p. 238. 



SUPERIORITY OF NORMANS. 1 3 

The points at which the Normans surpassed the 
Saxons, and were thus prepared to contribute new 
impulses to the national character, were three. The 
first of these was in weapons and warlike enterprise. 
They used the bow, and fought on horseback, and 
were thus ready for more aggressive and nimble 
movement, for skirmish as well as encounter. They 
were also of so martial a turn as to give promise of 
the ultimate unity and sure defense of Britain. No 
portion of Europe, and not even the new world, were 
withheld from the wild adventure of this race. 
Cape Cod is set down as the western limit of their 
explorations as early as the commencement of the 
eleventh century. 

A second superiority was found in culture, more 
particularly in poetry and architecture. They had 
shown gains in both of these directions, and were 
to become, in Gothic architecture, the most skilful 
builders in Europe. England and Normandy pos- 
sess many of their magnificent structures. In po- 
etry also they were relatively cultivated, their min- 
strels dividing with those of southern France the 
honors of the national Romance literature. 

Their third point of excellence, worth more per- 
haps than either of the other two, was the piety and 
intelligence of their clergy. Such men as Anselm 
and Lanfrane, transferred from the celebrated Ab- 
bies at Bee and Caen, were more superior to the 
native Saxon clergy in the grounds of just influence 
than were the Norman lords to the Saxon thanes. 
The conquest was thus attended with a new religious 
rule, and took possession of authority in both of its 



14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

great branches. The leading ecclesiastics, of which- 
ever portion of the nation, became identified with 
the Normans. ' We find among them, at that time 
and later, men of great ability, such as Thomas a 
Becket and William Wykeham. Though there was 
occasionally a bitter struggle against ecclesiastical 
influence in secular affairs, the superior clergy, 
directly and indirectly, exercised a strong civil au- 
thority, and were parties to the power of the state. 

For the first two hundred and fifty years suc- 
ceeding the conquest, the pride and arrogance of 
the Normans, sustained by these points of superi- 
ority, kept them aloof from the Saxons. The op- 
pression also which these suffered from their rulers 
embittered the division, and made the inferior party, 
as is wont to be the case, even more hostile than 
the superior one. French was the language of the 
court and of polite intercourse, and Saxon speech 
became a badge of inferiority and dependence. 
Cultivation and rank shrank away from it, and 
though it remained unshaken as the popular tongue, 
it soon began to undergo those changes, incident to 
grammatical decay, by which it passed into English. 
Resting for support upon the ignorant, and, from a 
literary point of view, the indifferent and the care- 
less ; living on the lips of the people, Saxon speech 
suffered a rapid loss of inflections and construction. 
These, sloughed off by misuse and disuse, left the 
English the most bald, but one of the most simple 
and serviceable of languages. 

The hostility of the Saxon subjects to their 
rulers was maintained, in the earlier reigns, by the 



RELATIONS OF SAXONS AND NORMANS. 1 5 

connection of the English throne with ducal author- 
ity in Normandy, making the fortunes of the former 
dependent on the latter; and by the severe rule of 
the Normans, especially in the extension of forests, 
and preservation of game. Little was done to con- 
solidate the nation till after the loss of Normandy 
under king John, and the final identification of the 
conquerors with England as the exclusive seat of 
authority, and centre of all possessions. 

There were indeed influences which began at 
once to abate the hostility of the Saxons and Nor- 
mans, and prepare the way for their later union in 
one nation. The clergy, never altogether partisan 
in its character, constantly became less so. The 
Englishman, Saxon or Norman in descent, found an 
open path to preferment in the church ; and thus 
the Norman features of authority rapidly softened 
in that most influential body, the clergy. Thus 
both Becket and Wykeham came up from the peo- 
ple, and won by talent the prominent positions they 
held. 

The wars also of the Normans in Wales, in Ire- 
land and on the continent, made them more de- 
pendent on the Saxons, and their common victories 
served to unite the two races. Add to these causes 
the softening influences of time, and of intercourse 
between parties of very unequal opportunities and 
rank, indeed, but characterized alike by solid en- 
dowments, and we are prepared for that ultimate 
subsidence of the flexible Normans into the mass 
of the community, by which the nation became one 
again in its dissolved and evenly diffused elements. 



1 6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

The Norman provinces being lost — a fresh in- 
debtedness of the nation, like that for the first char- 
ter of its liberties, to the tyranny and weakness 
of John — the two divisions of the English people, 
enclosed in one kingdom, and one island, and one 
set of interests ; too closely interlocked to render 
separation either desirable or possible, were, in the 
reign of Edward III., firmly compacted and welded 
together by their common national victories on the 
continent ; and by the commencement of that bitter 
warfare with France which evoked a rivalry and 
hostility of the two nations, from that time on- 
ward shaping the history of both of them. Already, 
then, in the fourteenth century, had there begun to 
be a movement toward liberty at home, interesting 
Norman lord and Saxon thane alike, while that 
century beheld the two, side by side, as English- 
men, gaining great victories on French battle-fields, 
and consolidating their national unity by a pro- 
longed conflict with those who had been to the Nor- 
man kinsmen and fellow-subjects. In the battle of 
Cressy, the English yeomen, a Saxon branch of the 
service, became a recognized national feature and 
national power by the stubbornness with which they 
held the field. This sense of superior unity, this 
growth of English influence are evinced by that na- 
tional jealousy which compelled Edward, on open- 
ing the conflict, to declare, "We will and grant and 
stablish that our said realm of England, nor the 
people of the same, of what estate or condition they 
be, shall not, in any time to come, be put in subjec- 
tion nor in obeisance of us, nor of our heirs and 



CONCESSIONS TO SAXONS. 1 7 

successors, as kings of France." We find also a 
similar concession to national feeling in the law, 
that all pleas " shall be pleaded, shewed, defended, 
answered, debated and judged in the English 
tongue." This was not only a step toward nation- 
ality, it was equally one toward justice and liberty, 
by bringing the action of the courts more imme- 
diately under the knowledge and criticism of the 
people. We know indeed that all legal and legisla- 
tive proceedings were not at once thereon trans- 
ferred into English, but for a time bore a mixed 
character. So decisive a movement could not com- 
plete itself instantly. In France, it was two cen- 
turies and one-half later, when a kindred transfer 
into the vernacular was effected. 

What, then, are the features of English character, 
appearing in this new nation, whose political, social 
and literary elements were, in the fourteenth cen- 
tury, passing into permanent union ? The English 
are a reflective people, as opposed to an impulsive, 
passionate one. Herein they are the reverse of the 
Irish, and unlike the sprightly, intuitive French. 
They have not the enthusiasm for a sentiment 
which stirs the French to such extreme and contra- 
dictory action; but they have a dogged policy, a 
predisposition settled in interest and conviction, 
which render them the most calculable and pa- 
tient, and ultimately the most irresistible, force in 
European politics. , It is inspiration. to an army of 
France, that forty centuries look down on it from the 
pyramids ; it nerves an English fleet to be told, in 
severe phrase, that England expects every man to do 



1 8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

his duty. What the sentiments are to one nation, 
the interests of life are to the other ; and if there is 
here some want of brilliancy, there is none of sub- 
stantial good. If there is less to nourish taste, there 
is more to feed affection ; if the fire does not flame in 
every wind, it is well raked in, and keeps warm the 
national hearth from century to century. 

The cast of English character is also of an ex- 
ternal, objective type, rather than of an internal, 
subjective one. In this they are opposed to the 
Germans. English thought issues in a physical 
good, a social gain, a practical view, with one foot 
upon the land and one upon the sea; German 
thought issues in a theory, a speculation, a criti- 
cism, whose locality and bearings are scarcely 
asked for; /which traverses the air, or, touching the 
earth, does it at times with a cloven foot. The 
fruits of the German mind are subtile spirits, that 
spring out of great heat of thought, bent, in way- 
ward fashion, on any or no mission ; the fruits of 
the English mind are spirits of a cold, tame, and 
serviceable cast, that, at the worst, can, like Caliban, 
be pinched and whipped into hard work. Thus ideal- 
ism has found few disciples in England, and the en- 
tire drift of her philosophy has been materialistic. 
For the most part she has grounded morals in 
utility, and thus made her theory the reflection of 
her practice:- Amid all her plodding, patient virtues, 
she has rarely had a bold, brilliant ideal, plucking 
at the heart, and lifting society into revolution. 
This reflective, external cast of English character 
has colored her literature and history, and, united 



LATIN INFLUENCE. 1 9 

with her insular, protected position, has given rise to 
a social and civil growth, slow, safe and continuous ; a 
growth that renders her institutions the most instruc- 
tive and interesting in the record of modern nations. 

Having defined the national character, every- 
where effective in English literature, we shall con- 
sider the foreign influences at work in its initiative 
period, the last half of the fourteenth century. In- 
directly, modern Europe is deeply indebted to the 
literature and cultivation of Greece and Rome. 
These were the seeds left in the soil ; and when 
the first savage, rugged growth of barbarism was 
cleared away, it was these that occupied the field, 
and slowly beautified it. The Latin influence was 
wrought into Latin Christianity, and spread, there- 
fore, with the evangelization of the Gothic races. 
Moreover these races came in their conquests every- 
where in contact with the laws and civilization of 
Rome, laws which slowly resumed sway in those 
provinces in which they had become indigenous. 
Latin was the only universal language of western 
Europe in the Middle Ages ; contained the works 
of religion, science, philosophy, the products of the 
times ; and transmitted S e classical works of 

earlier Rome. 

Grecian philosophy and poetry were more re- 
x -mote and indirect in their influence. The logic 
of Aristotle gave shape to the scholastic philosophy, 
but in a secondary form as it had found transmis- 
sion through Arabic, Jewish, Latin mediums. The 
direct influence of classical authors on English lit- 
erature in the fourteenth century would seem to 



20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

have been slight. It was most immediately in- 
debted to the Latin for those stories of earlier times, 
which reappear so often in the works of Chaucer 
and of later poets. These tales, increased by those 
of Oriental origin, and by others, native to the west 
of Europe, furnished a stock in trade to all the 
poets. They were transmitted in Latin collections, 
and also transferred to the vernacular tongues of 
the West. It was the hold they had secured on the 
popular mind by constant repetition, and the semi- 
historical character they bore in that credulous age, 
that fitted them to the purposes of the mediaeval 
minstrelsy, and gave them, by steady accretion, that 
flexible form and controlling influence which ren- 
dered them, even to such men as Chaucer and 
Shakespeare, a constant source of material. These 
themes were already in possession of a popular in- 
terest denied to a purely literary creation ; and the 
subjects of literature had thus a conventional exist- 
ence and force to which all readily yielded. The 
growth of history and invention has slowly pushed 
aside these stories, that thus presented new versions 
with every transfer, though even in our day we oc- 
casionally return to them with fresh zest. 

The second foreign force, which was especially 
operative in English literature, was Italian influence. 
As was to be expected, Italy was the first division 
of Europe, after the barbaric overflow, to regain 
the arts of civilization. In commerce, in freedom, 
in the industrial and fine arts, in literature, and, 
later, in science, she took the lead, a position she 
has failed to maintain, chiefly through political di- 



ITALIAN INFLUENCE. 21 

visions and ecclesiastical tyranny. No real liberty of 
thought, or settled polity, has found foothold on her 
soil. The three great poets of the fourteenth cen- 
tury were Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer, two Ital- 
ian and one English. The first of these in time was 
Dante. He was much less influenced than the 
other two in the form of his poetry by his own 
period. There was more moral elevation in his 
theme, there were more ethical force and senti- 
ment in his execution, and he aspired, under the 
guidance of Virgil, to the breadth and dignity of a 
great poet. Next came Petrarch, with whom Chau- 
cer may have met. His poetry was of that lyrical 
cast which chiefly affected English literature later 
than the time of Chaucer. Chaucer, the last of the 
three, stands in more immediate sympathy with 
Boccaccio, whose rehearsal in the Decameron of 
mediaeval tales has won for him his chief reputation. 
Some of these Chaucer has borrowed, or both have 
taken them from common sources. We may well 
believe that Chaucer was quickened by his Italian 
contemporaries, without being very directly guided 
by them. 

A last foreign influence, and one more immedi- 
ate than either of the others, were the romances 
and fabliaux of the Normans. The fabliaux were 
of a popular cast, briefer than the romances, and 
more diversified in their subjects. They had the 
ease, humor, and variety of the story, and were 
keyed to minor occasions. The romances were 
fitted to the intellectual palate of the gentry, were 
narrative and heroic, and required for their rehearsal 



22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF- ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

a more select occasion. The minstrels of northern 
and southern France divided the sentiments of chiv- 
alry between them. The valor and daring of the 
true cavalier were magnified by the Trouvere ; while 
the amatory song of the Troubadour dwelt on the 
devotion of the knight to his lady-love. Petrarch 
stood in much the same relation to the .lyric poetry 
of the south as Chaucer did to the epic verse of the 
north. \/ Each form degenerated, though the degen- 
eracy of erotic song is ever more fatal than that of 
heroic verse. The sentiment of love had, at best, 
in chivalry but an artificial and forced development, 
and was ready for an easy decline into lascivious- 
ness. The courage and valor of chivalry were more 
simple, sincere, normal to the condition of society ; 
and though liable to become hair-brained and ex- 
travagant in the exploits undertaken, yet retained 
some sound and wholesome quality. 

The romances deserve attention because of the 
influence they exerted on our Norman ancestry, and 
the social character of western Europe ; because a 
first and chief literary service to which the early 
English was put was the reception, and circulation, 
in prose and metrical form, of these narratives, as 
translated from the French ; and because the char- 
acter of English poetry has all along been affected 
by them, and that too strongly in its later periods. 
The chief subjects of these romances were Arthur 
and his knights, Charlemagne and his followers. 
Later were added warriors of the Crusades, and 
Grecian heroes. The story of Arthur and his knights 
of the round table offers a good illustration of the 



THE MINSTREL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 23 

growth of poetic fiction, its steady enlargement, the 
transmission of its resources, the currency and in- 
creasing interest it gives to its inventions. As chiv- 
alry was an institution of rigid and overstrained 
sentiments, this, its literary side, was very requisite 
to it, both as expressing and enforcing its views of 
character, as stimulating and rewarding its heroes. 
The minstrel was essential to the knightly pageant, 
as giving body, form and circulation to those fine- 
spun sentiments of life, of love, and of loyalty ; 
making them felt and operative in the rough, law- 
less impulses of the age. Without the minstrel to 
rehearse, in hours of leisure and festivity, warlike 
achievements ; and make positive, frequent and 
pungent their stimulus, chivalry could scarcely 
have gained or retained the influence it exerted. * It 
is not surprising that the minstrel became a sort of 
sacred character with claims of ingress and enter- 
tainment everywhere. The minstrel put the expe- 
rience and exploits of the knight in their most trans- 
figured and poetic form, and rehearsed them to his 
flattered and delighted senses. He became to the 
knight his idealizing spirit, holding before him a 
magic mirror, in which his deeds found the liveliest 
and most fascinating reflection., The knight thus 
learned how nobly he acted, how tenderly he felt, 
and with what enchantment he was invested. 
When these romances became more extravagant, 
and were, moreover, in the decay of chivalry, in- 
creasingly divorced from the actual temper and 
wants of men, it was a most serviceable task which 
Cervantes undertook in Don Quixote, that of turn 



24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

ing into ridicule the notion of knight errantry. We 
shall scarcely understand the value and success of 
this work, except as we see in it a last blow given 
to a proud and mischievous sentiment lingering be- 
yond its time. 

The Normans, famous cavaliers, haughty and 
irritable, had embodied their social feelings in this 
Romance literature, and could scarcely unite them- 
selves to a new language and nationality without a 
transfer of these, their favorite literary recreations. 
Thus the fourteenth century beheld a large repro- 
duction in English of these works, so essential to an 
adventurous and chivalrous gentry. Thus were 
they able to wont themselves to their new home 
with a reduced sense of loss. 

We have now spoken of the essential constit- 
uents of literature, urging two points, that the 
sesthetical impulse, or the element of form, is pre- 
dominant in literature, and the more so as long 
periods are taken into consideration ; and that a 
controlling force, giving character to the literary 
effort of any period, is found in the ethical nature. 
This is the light which imparts depth and coloring to 
our spiritual heavens, and, negatively or positively, 
determines the tone of the passing hour. We 
have spoken of the sluggish strength of the Saxons, 
the flexible enterprise of the Normans, slowly uniting 
to form English character on a type of unrivalled, 
patient, practical and aspiring sagacity. We then 
passed to the foreign influences at work in England 
in the fourteenth century, the initiative period of its 
literature. In common with western Europe, the 



THE SUMMARY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 2 5 

germs which began to reclothe the earth, when the 
flood of barbaric invasion had passed by, and the 
sedimentary deposit had become fixed, were found in 
Christianity, modified and sustained by Latin civili- 
zation. The classical influence on popular literature 
showed itself chiefly in a fund of stories, wrought 
and rewrought by the minstrelsy of different nations. 
Italy, as at the very centre of these civilizing forces, 
yielded the earliest growth, and became a source of 
art and literary cultivation to the Western nations. 
A third force felt in England was the native Norman 
poetry, indigenous to the times, peculiarly vigorous, 
and closely connected with their chivalrous charac- 
ter and customs. 

Such were the more remote fountains that fed 
the streams of English thought. We shall next 
turn to those which at home more directly and 
copiously maintained it. Many are the forces, near 
at hand and afar off, that are at work in national 
character and national life. If the future lies an 
open field before us, we march to take possession of 
it with our flocks and herds and household stuff. 
The good and the evil travel on together, and renew 
their conflict at each successive stage. We have 
sketched the leading conditions under which the 
English nation, newly compacted in its elements, 
occupied the fourteenth century, and made ready 
to work out the national history. As this evolves 
itself, we shall see the old taking up the new, and 
the new uniting itself to the old, with the organic 
freedom of forces, that hold within themselves their 
own law of life. 
2 



LECTURE II. 

Home Influences affecting English Literature in the Fourteenth 
Century. — Religious Life. — Social Life. — Language. — Prevalent 
Literature. 

We have now to speak of those home or do- 
mestic influences which in England gathered about 
and helped to shape the literature of the fourteenth 
century. 

They drop into four classes ; religious or ethical 
forces, social forces, language, and the directions or 
divisions of literature. These lie like concentric 
circles around the germanient points of growth, each 
succeeding one approaching more nearly, and af- 
fecting more definitely, the literary product of the 
time ; yet falling off in the scope and breadth of its 
influence. 

The outer, or ethical circle, when it fails to de- 
termine the immediate form and spirit of a pro- 
duction, constitutes none the less the atmosphere* 
the climate, under which it grows up, and thus de- 
cides the vigor of its life. Ethical influences so 
pervade our national life, that, positively or nega- 
tively, they set limits to all that is said or done in it. 
Like the rarity or density of the air, they settle the 
flight that is open to a given stroke of wing, how 
high it shall bear the spirit upward. 

In the fourteenth century, religion inter-pene- 
trated society, visibly touching and modifying it at 

(26) 



THE RELIGION OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 2*] 

all points. Its apparent power was much greater 
than now, its actual power much less. In propor- 
tion as faith forsakes the heart, and therefore ceases 
to rule in its own hidden and spiritual realm, does 
it strive, by compensation, in an external, solemn 
and ceremonial way, to show its presence, and se- 
cure authority over a portion of the actions of men. 
When men make a compromise with religion, with- 
holding a part and giving a part, their religious acts 
become at once exacting in form and ostentatious 
in fulfilment. They are the purchase-money, the 
exemption payment, good only as they are clearly 
and abundantly certified. Forms and superstitions 
are surface eruptions ; the blood clearing itself by 
cutaneous disease. The national life, failing to 
absorb and healthily to use the spiritual element, 
casts it to the surface in fears, credulities, and 
frivolous observances. 

In this and adjunct centuries, court, castle, 
cloister and cottage were equally infested with re- 
ligion, and almost equally destitute of it. The cor- 
ruption of the theory and practice of religion, was 
preparing the way for the reformation. The sources 
of religious authority had become the sources of 
evil, and virtue had been compelled to find a refuge 
in the individual heart alone. This is the descrip- 
tion of Avignon while the seat of the papacy, as 
given by Petrarch. "You imagine that the city of 
Avignon is the same now that it was when you re- 
sided in it ; it is very different. It was then, it is 
true, the worst and vilest place on earth, but it has 
now become a terrestrial hell, a residence of fiends 



28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

and devils, a receptacle of all that is most wicked 
and abominable. In this city there is no piety, no 
reverence or fear of God, no faith or charity, noth- 
ing that is holy, just, equitable or humane. Why 
should I speak of truth when not only the houses, 
palaces, courts, churches and the thrones of popes 
and cardinals, but the very earth and air seem to 
teem with lies. Good men have of late been treated 
with so much contempt and scorn, that there is not 
one left amongst them to be an object of their 
laughter." * 

This corruption was unequal in different branch- 
es of the church. The higher clergy had more in- 
centives to vice than the inferior clergy, and among 
these were to be found many devout men. The 
mendicant orders also, existing under a peculiarly 
distorted and vagrant form of life, became cor- 
respondingly vicious and worthless. In the gallery 
of the Canterbury Tales, we have portraits of vari- 
ous religious personages. Let us glance at them. 

First, there is a well-to-do monk, with gown 
lined with the finest fur, a lover of good horses and 
good living, and fond of the chase. 

His hed was balled, and shone as any glass, 
And eke his face, as it hadde ben anoint, 
He was a lord ful fat and in good point. 
His eyen stepe, and rolling in his head, 
******** 
He was not pale as a forpined gost, 
A fat swan loved he best of any rost. 

He cares little about the rules of his order, and 
is bent on having a good time. 

* Henry's " History of Great Britain," vol. viii. p. 366. 



1 



FRIAR CLERK PARSON. 29 

This ilke monk lette olde thinges pace. 
And held after the newe world the trace. 
He yave not of the text a pulled hen, 
That saith, that hunters ben not holy men : 

Next comes a friar, a mendicant, full of dalliance 
and fair language. 

He was an esy man to give penance, 
Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance : 
******** 

Therto he strong was as a champioun, 
And knew wel the tavernes in every toun, 
And every hosteler and gay tapstere. 

He shirked beggars, was familiar with prosper- 
ous farmers, pleased the housewives, and had more 
skill than any one in his cloister in securing, by 
means of soft, lisping English, a merry song, a 
twinkling eye, even from the poorest widow, a far- 
thing before he left. 

Then comes the clerk of Oxford, as yet without 
a benefice. 

As lene was his hors as is a rake, 
And he was not right fat, I undertake. 

He had in him the spirit of scholarship, how- 
ever, and preferred to have at his bed's head, twenty 
books of Aristotle than rich robes or fiddle. 

Of studie toke he moste cure and hede, 
Not a word spake he more than was nede ; 
And that was said in forme and reverence, 
And short and quike, and ful of high sentence. 

On the parish parson, Chaucer bestows a rich 
dowry of graces. He is learned, devout, diligent, 
self-denying ; watching over his flock with tender- 
ness, and guiding them equally by example and 



30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

precept. He withholds nothing necessary to com- 
plete the character of a faithful and loving teacher. 

That Christes gospel trewely wolde preche, 
******** 

A better preest I trowe that nowher non is, 
He waited after no pompe ne reverence, 
Ne maked him no spiced conscience, 
But Christes lore, and his apostles twelve, 
He taught, but first he folwed it himselve. 

Quite another person is the sompnour, or sum- 
moner, whose office it was to call any person who 
had broken the laws of Holy Church. He had 
a fire-red face, narrow eyes, scald brows, a beard 
thin and scurvy, and warts and freckles, that no 
ointment could mollify. He liked leeks, onions and 
strong wine, and when tipsy, shouted his law Latin 
as one mad. He was a terror to children, com- 
muted the sentences of the arch-deacon for a fine, 
and sought everywhere his vicious and lecherous 
pleasures, yielding like indulgences -to others on 
terms of a bribe. 

One other religious character appears in the 
pardoner. His yellow hair flowed loosely down his 
shoulders. 

His wallet lay beforne him in his lappe, 
Bret-ful of pardon come from Home al hote, 
******** 

And in a glas he hadde pigges bones, 

which he sold as those of saints. 

But with these relikes, whanne that he fond 
A poure persone dwelling up on lond, 
Upon a day, he gat him more moneie 
Than that the persone gat in monethes tweie. 



CONTRADICTIONS OF CHARACTER. 3 1 

He performed his services in a loud command- 
ing voice, denounced habitually the love of money 
as the root of all evil, produced his bulls from Rome, 
spoke a few words in Latin to season his discourse, 
and admonished his hearers, 

That no man be so bold, ne preest ne clerk, 
Me to disturbe of Christes holy werk. 

He then produced his relics, informed the rustics of 
the various cures they would work on man and 
beast, and their power to remove jealousy. He 
unblushingly announces, to his fellow-travellers, his 
temper of mind. 

For I wol preche and beg in sondry londes, 
I wol not do no labour with min hondes, 
Ne make baskettes for to live therby, 
Because I wol not beggen idelly, 
I wol non of the apostles contrefete : 
I wol have money, wolle, chese and whete, 
Al were it yeven of the pourest page, 
Or of the pourest widewe in a village : 
Al shulde hire children sterven for famine. 

Such are the strong contradictions of character 
that the religious world presented in the time of 
Chaucer, and such the preponderance of evil. 
Over against the devout parson, appear the sleek, 
luxurious, self-indulgent monk, with strong physical 
appetites ; the meddlesome friar, full of low cun- 
ning, importunate and unscrupulous ; the summoner, _ 
or go-between in ecclesiastical courts, persecuting 
the innocent, sheltering offenders, commuting pen- 
alties, loathsome in the personal fruits of sin, and 
full of effrontery; the pardoner, bent on gain, 
plausible in appearance, sacrilegious in speech, 



32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

unconscientious in method, with a joint stock of 
falsehood and cunning, working as an inexhaustible 
vein of wealth, the ignorance and superstition of 
the lower classes ; and a canon, introduced later, 
who is deeply involved in the delusions and frauds 
of alchemy. 

There is in this picture of the religious life of 
the times, the sharpest contradictions and the 
highest irritations, These are of two kinds, both 
of which strongly affected the literature of the cen- 
tury ; the irritation of the ethical sense of a few, the 
irritation of the common-sense of .many. The one 
result finds representation in Wicliffe, the other in 
Chaucer. The spirit of Christianity has never been 
so smothered under those rank overgrowths of su- 
perstition that have shot above it, as not, from time 
to time, to make new points of disclosure. " This 
has never been merely a fallen and decaying trunk, 
nourishing lichen, moss and fern, but has some- 
where sent up a fresh growth, wherewith to replace 
and continue the primitive stock. Early and signif- 
icant among those movements of sturdy resistance, 
which at length resulted in the Reformation, was 
that of Wicliffe, a rejection on moral grounds of 
that perverted, religious life expressed in the eccle- 
siasticism of the time. Christianity indicates its 
independent, spiritual power, shows itself to be 
rooted in the constitution of man and the world, by 
the vigorous way in which it has ever opened a new 
conflict within its own household, rejected the devel- 
opments which oppressing, perverting circumstances 
have fastened upon it, and, returning to initial prin- 



THE IRRITATION OCCASIONED. 33 

ciples, has once more forced its way outward in re- 
newed, regenerated activity. One of the purest and 
most influential of these efforts of restoration found 
its origin in this antagonism of the religious life of 
England. 

The second irritation was more general, but less 
powerful than this of the religious sense. It sprang 
from the exacting, dishonest and openly corrupt form 
which religious action had assumed. It rejected 
the monk, not because he was a monk, but because 
he despised and laughed at the rules of his order. 
It rejected the friar, not because he imposed con- 
fession and penance, but because he did it in -his own 
behoof; the summoner, not as an officer of justice, 
but for his ribaldry and extortion ; and the seller of 
indulgences, not on account of his traffic, but be- 
cause he dealt in sham relics. 

And thus with fained flattering and japes, 
He made the persone and the peple, his apes. 

The summoner and mendicant friar were espe- 
cially distasteful to the English. They each, in the 
Canterbury Tales, expose the misdeeds of the other, 
and, in a conflict of mutual abuse, are drawn out 
and set apart for our equal and hearty detestation. 
They both sinned against strong English feelings, 
the one against fair dealing, and honesty between 
man and man ; and the other against the privacy and 
purity of the home. The mendicant was held in 
detestation as an unmanly, impertinent beggar, who 
pretended to pay for his keep and clothing in 
prayers, and then shirked even this return. His 
habitual and unforgiven sin was that, 
2* 



34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

In every hous he gan to pore and prie, 

and thus left no place free from his meddling and 
mischief, his sales and pious pilfer. 

The offence of the summoner, though less irri- 
tating and constant, was not less grave. In the 
tales to which reference has been made, one of the 
class serves a false notice on a widow, and then 
professes himself willing to hush up the matter for 
twelve pence. Failing of this, he lays claim to her 
new pan. The upshot is, that the devil, who has 
been the travelling companion in disguise of the 
summoner, puts in an appearance, and claims his 
own in this wise, 

Now brother, quod the devil, be not wroth ; 
Thy body and this panne ben min by right, 
Thou shalt with me to helle yet to-night. 
Wher thou shalt knowen of our privatee 
More than a maister of divinitee. 

While, therefore, these pertinacious, multiplied, 
omnipresent abuses of the religious impulse, found 
a strong support in the ignorance and superstition 
of the masses, they were also at war with stubborn 
English instincts, a love of home, industry and 
justice ; and were a perpetual irritant to the com- 
mon-sense and good-will of the more intelligent. 
The religious influence of the time, therefore, was 
one of general restlessness, provoking satire and 
stern attack. 

The social phase of life, the second circle of 
force that gathered about our literature, was of an 
equally declared and extreme cast. Its prevailing ' 
spirit was that of chivalry. However, the poet 



CHIVALRY. 35 

may idealize this institution, the philanthropist can 
only regard it as casting a slight glow over a very 
dark and discouraging period. It grew out of 
incessant warfare, and this under the unendurable 
form of public and private feud, of contagious, 
universal and interminable strife ; a state of things 
which a lingering sentiment of humanity sought 
feebly to remedy by the Truce of God, rescuing, 
under the sanction of religious sentiments, a portion 
of each week from acts of violence. The mailed 
knight fills the historic, as well as the poetic, page ; 
and the gentry of France, cutting down and riding 
over their own foot-soldiers at the battle of Cressy, 
the more quickly to reach the enemy, reveals the 
spirit of the age. The soldier came to receive 
much larger pay than the artisan ; and gentility 
honored or won its rank in the tournament and on 
the battle-field. The literature, like the life of the 
time, was imbued with an extravagant martial spirit. 
A large amount of composition in Western Europe 
gave itself to inflaming the sentiments of chivalry, 
and resulted in incalculable mischief, so far as all 
peaceful and just life was concerned. 

No permanent, civil, commercial or social good 
could grow out of this martial mania, or bless a 
people cursed by it. The fictions of poetry may 
make a glowing dream of it, but the facts of his- 
tory can only show it to have been a waking, wide- 
spread horror ; a perpetual disruption of society, and 
overthrow of its peaceful virtues and fruitful arts. 

The courtly qualities into which chivalry was 
baptized, were courage, loyalty, courtesy, munifi- 



2,6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

cence. Its sentiment was honor ; its reward, love. 
Exalted as these incentives may seem, they were 
so divorced from sober, substantial, retiring virtues ; 
so overleaped the bounds of common-sense and 
common honesty, as often to make their possessors 
more implacable and infuriate than simple, native 
savageness would have rendered them. The honor 
of knights was one that wrought irritation among 
themselves, and contempt toward all others ; their 
love and courtesy were fanciful, exaggerated senti- 
ments, ready to overstep the limits of marital obliga- 
tion and domestic virtue. Their courage and loyalty 
were merely the breath of praise, with which they 
blew their own passions into an intolerable heat ; 
and their munificence, the free, careless hand which 
goes with rapine and tyranny. Such virtues, like 
polished armor, may dazzle the vagrant eye, but so 
far as they conceal, adorn and quicken the demoni- 
ac spirit of war, they are all the worse for the bril- 
liancy of the disguise. Prodigal splendor, thought- 
less courage, and that magnanimity which, punctili- 
ous to equals, makes little of the safety and the 
happiness and the rights of inferiors that chance to 
lie in its path, have not much to commend them 
to humanity. They are born of selfishness and tyr- 
anny, and, therefore, in their ultimate elements 
are most mean and base and worthless. 

We are wont to think that women were especial- 
ly indebted to the courtesy of chivalry, and this, in 
a measure, is true, if we consider the violence and 
rude passion of the times. Man as against man, 
enforced certain restraints under this sentiment. 



CHIVALROUS SENTIMENT. 37 

It was a reduction and softening down of a rough 
and lawless period. Yet it, itself, often rose to a 
foolish fanaticism, or sank to gross impurity. It 
had its "love fraternities," 'Move courts," leading to 
absurdities only less than those of the religious sen- 
timent; and instituting obligations quite in over- 
sight of the duties of domestic life. If we were to 
go back to the darkness of those dark days ; we 
might be glad to cheer it with the light of chivalry, 
but fortunately we are rid of both. 

Yet if men are to be brutish, we would certainly 
desire that they might also be courageous ; if they 
are to be proud, we would wish to temper pride 
with courtesy ; if they are to fight, it is better they 
should do it in fellowship, for this is partial peace ; 
if they are to revel, that their indulgences should 
come with social sentiments and jollity. Chivalry 
was the deceptive bloom of unripe fruit ; those who 
set their teeth in it, found it sharp and indigestible. 
Chivalry gave a tint of amethyst to a bitter winter's 
day. Those who looked out from castle windows, 
found their delight in it, but God's poor were frozen 
none the less. Later, as the expression of a sweet 
and gentle heart, as the dream of poetry, it has be- 
come quite another thing, a prodigality of nature 
that at once satisfies the mind and feeds the senses. 

Pride, in a violent and offensive form, is closely 
connected with the ascendancy of the military 
spirit. 

Says Froissart : " When I was at Bordeaux- a 
little before the departure of the Prince of Wales 
on his expedition into Spain, I observed that the 



38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

English were so proud and haughty, that they could 
not behave to the people of other nations with any 
appearance of civility." 

Says William of Malmsbury : " Every one swell- 
ing with pride and rancor scorns to cast a look on 
his inferiors, disclaims his equals, and proudly 
rivals his superiors." A Venetian traveller gives 
this description of the English : " They think that 
there are no other men than themselves, and no 
other world but England ; and whenever they see a 
handsome foreigner, they say that he looks like an 
Englishman." This pride, enhanced, doubtless, by 
the superiority of the Norman to the Saxon, was 
also greatly strengthened by the personal superior- 
ity of the knight, encased in armor, to soldiers of 
inferior grade. To the inevitable arrogance of mil- 
itary authority, was thus added almost complete 
personal impunity. The musket-ball, when it came, 
was a great leveller, and powder has been the most 
democratic of inventions. Modern society, though 
in fact widening the real differences in character 
and advantages between the high and low, has 
greatly reduced the pride that attends upon these 
distinctions. The knight, scarcely superior to his 
followers in cultivation, was thrown by the conditions 
of his life on terms of familiar intercourse, almost 
intimacy, with them. With all his haughtiness, he 
mingled habitually with his servants, and accepted 
close personal service from them. He combined, in 
one character, the arrogant leader and jovial com- 
panion, drawing near to his retainers in tastes and 
sentiments, while he stood apart from them in rank. 



RELATION OF LEADER AND RETAINER. 39 

Thus the rough leader both swears with and swears 
at his comrades. 

The luxury of the nobility showed itself chiefly 
in food and dress. Their castles, constructed for 
defense, were, in most cases, but narrow and cheer- 
less abodes. Their feasts were of a hearty and 
rollicking, rather than of a refined and luxurious, 
character. Sixty fat oxen are mentioned as an 
item in one of them. A love of hospitality early 
belonged to the English. Says the same Italian 
traveller, " They think that no greater honor can be 
conferred or received, than to invite others to eat 
with them ; and they would sooner give five or six 
ducats to provide an entertainment for a person, 
than a groat to assist him in any distress." * Over 
against this luxury of the few, we have to put very 
general poverty and a low grade of life, especially in 
the country and villages. The laws were very 
inadequately administered, and property was inse- 
cure. The peasantry in their houses of " mud and 
sticks " were often at the mercy of depredators, and 
agriculture was greatly depressed. This is shown 
by the frequent and severe famines, and the various 
forms of pestilence, the plague, the sweating sick- 
ness, the black tongue, that swept through the coun- 
try, at times almost depopulating it. Discourage- 
ment, poverty and extreme ignorance hovered over 
the masses. Debased by superstition, and familiar 
with injury, they had too little to hope for, and too 
little to lose, to offer much resistance. In the open 
country, so weak were the laws, there was little pro- 

* Knight's " History of England," vol. ii. p. 254. 



40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

tection for industry, and hence little motive to it. 
The home of the peasant was open to plunder, with- 
out hope of redress. The coat of arms of one of 
these marauders bore this inscription, " I am Cap- 
tain Warner, commander of a troop of robbers, an 
enemy to God, without pity and without mercy."* 
In the cities, especially in London, the middle 
classes first learned their power, and by commerce 
and the arts climbed into strength. The domestic 
virtues had yet secured but a slight foothold, and 
the homes of the nobles in their heavy, cheerless 
walls, and large dining-halls, pushed into the fore- 
ground the ideas of feasting and defense. War stood 
on the right side, and riot on the left. 

The character of woman always goes far to de- 
fine social influences, as she, above all, is subject to 
them, and they in turn are, in large part, in her 
keeping. There are two types of female character 
that appear in Chaucer, the fruits, on opposite sides, 
of the spirit of the age. The first is represented by 
the prioress, simple, pleasing, and dainty, winning 
in manners, gentle and pitiful in disposition. 

" At mete was she wel ytaughte withalle ; 
She lette no morsel from hire lippes falle, 
Ne wette hire fingres in hire sauce depe. 
Wel coude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe, 
Thatte no drope ne fell upon hire brest." 

Pretty and agreeable accomplishments were 
these, when one without forks shared his trencher 
with his companion. Forks, needful instruments as 
they are of refinement, seem to have fallen earlier to 

* Henry's History, vol. viii. p. 386. 



FEMALE CHARACTER. 41 

the Fiji than to Englishmen. It is probable, 
therefore, that human flesh was one of the first mor- 
sels held in dainty contemplation at a fork's end.* 

Quite opposite to her, is the type seen in the 
wife of Bath, skilled in weaving and domestic 
manufacture, bold in bearing, and, withal, a woman 
of large travel. 

" Thrice had she been at Jerusalem." She was 
loud in laughter and in talk. 

" Bold was hire face, and fayre and rede of hew. 
Housbondes at the chirche dore had she had five." 

Jaunty, thrifty, and fearless, careful neither in 
speech nor act, she made herself formidable either 
as a spouse or a companion. Her latest and best 
conjugal adjustment was this : 

" And whan that I had getten unto me 
By maistrie all the soverainetee, 
And that he sayd, min owen trewe wif, 
Do as thee list, the terme of all thy lif, 
Kepe thin honour, and kepe eke min estat ; 
After that day we never had debat." 

A like and stronger contrast is there between 
such a character as Grisilde and the hostess of 
the Tabard ; the one softening the harsh, extreme 
tyranny of her lord by patient submission and un- 
conquerable affection ; the other striving perpetually 
to goad and exasperate her husband into an ill- 
nature equal to her own. 

" By Goddes bones, whan I bete my knaves, 
She bringeth me the grete clobbed staves, 
And cryeth ; slee the dogges everich on, 
And breke hem bothe bak and every bon." 

* Pre-Historic Times, p. 454. 



42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

These contrasts belong to a period of rude 
domination, where the only choice for woman lay 
between the extremes of submission and resistance ; 
between coarse strength, lawless, unlovely and in- 
vulnerable force ; and meek endurance, the persua- 
sion of patience, the gentle, admirable graces of 
weakness. One may love these virtues, though 
he hates the violence that evokes them. English 
society in the time of Chaucer was still in that 
savage state in which woman must either shy and 
dodge the brutality about her, making such a show 
as she was able of the mild and submissive traits 
of character ; or, bursting the bonds of slavery 
and nature at once, become formidable by becom- 
ing unendurable, setting up her safeguards in 
the violence of vituperation. Thus we have the 
shrew ; a character so familiar in the early drama. 
The virtues and vices of bondage partake alike of 
its taint. 

The church sinned against woman in two re- 
spects. While it made of marriage a sacrament, 
it, nevertheless, by insisting on the celibacy of the 
clergy, and constructing its religious orders on the 
same principle, gave an inferior, an impure char- 
acter to this relation, especially fitted to reflect 
discredit upon woman. Far worse than this : by 
the licentiousness of its chosen servants it invaded 
the household, and established, as vicious connec- 
tions, those relations which it scorned to accept in 
good faith. Thus the religious corps became as 
numerous, as searching, and as unclean as the frogs 
of Egypt, which penetrated into all quarters, into 



LICENTIOUSNESS OF LANGUAGE. 43 

the ovens and kneading-troughs, leaving their filthy 
trail wherever they went. Henry, Bishop of Liege, 
could unblushingly boast the birth of twenty-two 
children in fourteen years. 

Chaucer says, that many hundred years ago, 
England was full of fairies and elfs, but now every 
field and every stream so swarms with friars, thick 
as motes in a sunbeam, that the jolly crew have 
altogether fled. He delivers the last telling blow 
of his irony in the words : 

" Women may now go safely up and doun, 
In every bush, and under every tree, 
Ther is non other incubus but he, 
And he ne will don hem no dishonour." 

Such is the gain the poetic satire tosses to view, 
the presence of scrupulous, meek-eyed friars, in 
the place of wanton, mischief-making fairies, in the 
groves and along the by-paths. 

One of the most undeniable social features of 
the time, showing their half-barbaric cast, was that 
sensuality of language which is the cheap dye of 
vulgar wit. The taint of it is especially strong in 
Chaucer, frequently quite overpowering the poetic 
aroma. One wonders what evil beast has strayed 
among these flowers. L confess to a certain shame 
in speaking of Chaucer to the healthy and pure, so 
far is he from wholesome companionship. As mir- 
rored in the Canterbury Tales, English speech was 
at once gross and licentious. The offence is pal- 
pable to the very senses, and not to the moral 
instincts simply. Startled by the sudden burden 
of the air, we hasten on, nor care to know all the 



44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

grounds of the wrong done us. Distance is our 
instant and only remedy. Those superior instincts 
of our nature, by which we lift the eye and thought 
from the animal portions and gross functions of 
our being, by which we move amid contamination 
as light unstained of evil things, were all for- 
gotten ; and men, as swine, rooted for food where 
food chanced to be. There is no apology for this ; 
it is the personal impurity, the filth unwashed away, 
that remain from a savage life. There is only one 
point of reduction we have to make. Language, 
before it is cleansed of a given license, does not, 
to those who then use it, bring the same gross 
imagery and rank offence, that it necessarily does 
to those, who, from an advanced position, for a mo- 
ment, return to it. Though it is not true, that lan- 
guage and life, the exterior form and interior fact of 
virtue, are independent of each other ; that ribaldry 
does not taint the blood, and burn as fire in the 
bones, it is true, that coarseness of speech and 
grossness of action, owing a portion of their start- 
ling effect upon us to the want of familiarity, are 
more consistent with substantial purity in those who 
are habituated to them, than they at first sight seem 
to be. Enough ; we thank God there are five cen- 
turies between us and this surface sewerage of 
early English society. Vice is buried deeper, and 
by so much leaves the atmosphere purer, now than 
then. 

Our third topic is that of language. For the 
first two hundred years following the Conquest, the 
divisions of speech seem to have been strongly de- 






LANGUAGE. 45 

fined. Latin, the language of the church, was the 
universal tongue, the medium of communication on 
topics of religion and philosophy. French was the 
speech of the court and nobles ; and Saxon, of the 
mass of the nation. Layamon's Chronicle, a work 
of thirty-two thousand lines, written in Saxon, a 
century and a half after the Conquest, contains 
scarcely fifty French words. All of these lan- 
guages were used carelessly, and, with the excep- 
tion of Latin, chiefly in speech. They, therefore, 
underwent rapid changes. Latin was saved from 
permanent debasement by possessing a fixed point 
of reversion and revision in classical literature, in a 
standard previously set up, and which none could 
abrogate or permanently modify. We may well 
believe, however, that Latin suffered much perver- 
sion in its ordinary use. This is shown in what is 
termed Leonine Verse, usually devoted to satire, 
and constructed on accent and rhyme in neglect of 
quantity; also in Macaronic Poetry, an amalgam of 
different languages. Two archbishops in succes- 
sion cautioned the universities against such forms 
as ; ego curret, tu curret, curens est ego, pressing 
the point that they were not correct. Some have 
supposed from the constancy with which Latin was 
used in accounts, that there was a very .general 
familiarity with it. When, however, we look at 
those accounts, we see that very little knowledge of 
Latin was required for their composition. A few 
connecting phrases were sufficient, and rendered 
the same exhaustive service as a half-dozen words 
to a court crier. We give an abridged example : 



46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, 

" Et pro uno seedcod empto Hid, 
Et pro factura de drawgere Hid. 
Et pro uno dongecart empto XlVd."* 

The Norman French, in the latter stages of 
change, as the nobles were slowly adopting the 
English, must, as a spoken language, have had a 
very shifting, careless law of use. This change 
seems to" have occurred mainly in the fourteenth 
century. It was accompanied by the consolida- 
tion of the nation to which reference has been 
made ; by a larger transfer of French romances 
to the English ; and by that new national char- 
acter shown in the works of Chaucer, marked 
though they are with French idioms and filled 
with French words. The Saxon, the neglected 
tongue of the common people, losing its organic 
force, first confounded and then dropped its gram- 
matical inflexions. It thus passed into the simple 
and hospitable English, which, almost devoid of 
inflexions, could receive all the words of other 
languages that any chose to bring to it. The 
Saxon gave the bulk of its vocabulary to the 
English, left behind its distinctive and exacting 
features of grammar, and with the simplest pos- 
sible construction, passed over as a new language 
to new-comers. That English pronunciation, un- 
der such a derivation, should be a network of 
perplexities and anomalies, is not surprising. 

The English, in its very limited and fragmen- 
tary grammar, and comprehensive vocabulary, arose 
from social exigencies, which the nation inevitably 

* Henry's History of Great Britain, vol. viii. p. 271. 



LANGUAGE. 47 

and unconsciously strove to meet ; and from the 
fresh nationality which all parties were combining 
to develop. In the fourteenth century, the unit- 
ing, constructive forces, had so far come to prevail, 
that a new language, open for all uses, and ready 
for a great career, was the result. Chaucer laid 
hold of this germinant speech, disclosed its power, 
helped farther to determine the proportion of ele- 
ments which should belong to it, and passed it on, 
accelerated in growth and enriched by his handling. 
He justified the language to itself and to others by 
showing what it could do. He strengthened and 
honored it by great literary works, and thus com- 
mended it to public favor. It has been observed, 
that the English has changed less than other Eu- 
ropean languages in the years that have intervened 
between the present and the fourteenth century. 
For this fact, several reasons may be given. The 
excellence and eminence of Chaucer served to set 
up a standard, to establish early an authority in 
the language. This conservative tendency was 
greatly strengthened later by the translations of 
the Bible, intimately connected with each other, 
generally circulated, and closely united to popular 
speech. Moreover, our chief literary period, that 
of Elizabeth, lies relatively well back in our his- 
tory, and thus early stamped on the language its 
character. The linguistic fact of most significance 
in the fourteenth century, is the junction then 
effected in the elements of our vocabulary. We 
may represent this union as the flowing of the 
Norman into the Saxon, receiving from it a new 



48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

law and direction, and passing on with it as Eng- 
lish. While, however, there was an influx in 
volume of French words in the fourteenth cen- 
tury, many smaller tributaries from it and the 
Latin, earlier and later, passed without observa- 
tion into the new tongue, the great river of English 
speech. 

The fourth and last circle of influence which 
gathered about our early literature, were the forms 
it assumed. It was almost exclusively a literature 
of poetry. The prose works of the time have an 
archaic and moral interest for us, rather than an 
artistic one. Poetry, not only comes first in litera- 
ture proper, it is likely long to remain the almost 
exclusive feature of literary art, and is sure to 
retain the first position in all creative periods. 
Poetry owes so much to form, is so far the best 
expression of a shaping artistic force, as at once 
to imply its presence, and to invite its labor. Nor 
is it strange that we have poetry before we have 
prose, any more than it is strange that we have 
cathedrals, while those who build them still live in 
hovels. The strongest, most universal, most ele- 
vating impulse will be the first to command art. 
This in architecture is religion ; and in literature 
is imaginative sentiment. Not till men have set- 
tled down to a faithful, thorough view of life, will 
they value prose as a vehicle of truth, a thesaurus 
of facts ; and not till art has so diffused itself as to 
give grace and expression to the familiar, homely 
things of daily life, will prose become artistic, and 
pass up into literature. 



prose. 49 

« 

Moreover, poetry has a definite form, a sensible 
impression, which allows its oral transfer without 
change, its rehearsal without shifting, aimless 
modifications. While language lives chiefly on 
the tongue and in the ear, the rhythm of poetry 
is the first luxury of speech, and takes to its ser- 
vice, the universal, easily aroused love of music, 
The minstrel blends in his rehearsal two arts, and 
draws the heart after him with double bonds. The 
changes also which rhythm calls for are readily 
made in these flexible periods of speech, and them- 
selves become controlling, formative laws. 

Prose, on the other hand, in its typical service, 
instruction, — for it is not till later, it furnishes the 
novel stealing in part the purposes of poetry, — be- 
longs to written language, and periods of patient 
thought ; and implies, therefore, that the useful is 
holding even sway with the beautiful, reflection 
with imagination. Art, in the fourteenth century, 
rested as yet with poetry. We have, indeed, prose 
in two most diverse forms, but prose that serves 
rather to fix a date than to illuminate it. 

Sir John Mandeville, in the middle of the cen- 
tury, gives us his gossipy, fugacious travels that 
stint at no marvels, and grant to myths as easy 
admittance as if the author were at a fairy tale. 
There are thus huddled together, fancies for the 
poet and a few facts for the historian ; as first reap- 
ers, on the margin of a great field, may gather and 
bind* in one sheaf, grass and flowers and scattered 
heads of grain. The only other prose author re- 
quiring mention is Wicliffe. His was a simple, 
3 



50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

sturdy, moral purpose ; a translation of the Bible into 
the vernacular, the English of common life. In this 
he was aided by others. The simplicity and spirit- 
uality of their motive, and the direct, colloquial 
force of the current language, gave to this version a 
character like that which still belongs to our Eng- 
lish Bible. This translation, appearing in 1480, 
had a wide circulation, though unaided by printing, 
and passed from hand to hand with danger. 

It wrought secretly in the English mind for a 
century and a half, waiting for that second and 
more fortunate initiation of a like work under Tyn- 
dale, which gives the leading date to our present 
version. 

These, then, are the domestic influences, the 
coarse and conflicting forces which joined hands, 
and gathered close around the growth of our liter- 
ary art : a religion overlying offensively the sur- 
face of society, at war equally with the honest in- 
stincts of the human heart, and with the seeds of 
life hidden under its own corruptions ; a social 
temper, extravagant and absurd in its fanciful vir- 
tues, gross in its real vices, fighting the deadliest 
sins with a poetic, fictitious sentiment ; a language 
gorged with wayward, unorganized material, and 
waiting for some mastery of mind, some fire of the 
spirit to lift, consolidate and temper it ; and a lit- 
erature of poetry, that, with careless, uncritical 
strength, used or abused, as happened, whatever 
came to hand, that grew and flourished with native 
vigor, on the elements about it, rank as these some- 
times were. 



LECTURE III. 

Chaucer. — Appearance. — Character. — National Poet, (a) in Direc- 
tion of Composition, (b) in Language. 

Progressive Poet, (a) in Religion, (b) in Politics, (c) in Poetry. — 
Choice of Themes and Forms. — His Dramatic Power. — 
Pathos, Humor. 

Relation of Art and Reform. 

The Retrogressive Period. — Due, (a) to Rejection of Reform, {b) 
Civil Wars, — Printing. — Place of the Moral Element. 

We have now spoken of both the foreign and 
domestic influences that gathered about the four- 
teenth century, the initiative period of English lit- 
erature. There was but one man of such power 
that we need to consider him separately ; to mark 
the control of his genius as itself a distinct element 
of growth. That man was Chaucer. Though the 
times in a measure circumscribe genius, genius 
gives to the times the brightest light that is in 
them. The position and material of the illumina- 
tion are found in the age ; but how far its pointed 
flame shall ascend is determined by him who feeds 
it. Without Chaucer, the fourteenth century would 
flicker and glimmer in our literary history with a 
light but little greater than that of antecedent years. 
If the dreary, tedious Gower, for a time at least the 
friend of Chaucer, remained as the chief represen- 
tative of early English poetry, few indeed would 
seek those pale rays, or much value them when 
found. It was the task of genius to lift the period 

(so 



52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

into permanent distinction, and shed upon it its 
serene glory. Gower, ambling his Pegasus with 
placid indifference along a way of Latin or French 
or English verse, as it chanced, alike plodding in 
all, established the average grade of the time, 
spreads out, in his multitudinous verse, the Egyp- 
tian plain, above which towers in strength Chaucer, 
a sphynx that renders conspicuous and memorable 
through the silent repose of many centuries the en- 
trance of that way, which leads in literature to our 
great national labors. 

Chaucer was of moderate stature, full form, of 
somewhat retiring manners, with a sharp, humorous 
and downcast eye ; a lover of books, and good liv- 
ing; of large experience, and varied intercourse 
with men. His life was not merely one of literary 
activity, but of extensive public service. He was 
directly attached to the court, and assigned missions 
of trust at home and abroad. 

In quality of manhood he was thoroughly Eng- 
lish. English in the outward, observant cast of his 
mind ; in his honest handling of facts without gloss 
or concealment ; in his humor, his good-fellowship, 
his love of men and their doings. Says Browne, in 
his enforcement of this point, " The national char- 
acter is a root of bravery rising to a stem of strong, 
social feeling, gnarled and twisted just above the 
ground with genuine fun. Said to be slow to talk, 
the English are good fellows through it all. To 
put it differently, they are before all things human 
and sociable. In this sense, who is an Englishman 
more English than Chaucer. He loves the haunts 



THE ENGLISH CHARACTER OF CHAUCER. 53 

of men, the places where they dwell, the episodes 
of mutual need that bring and keep them together ; 
meat and drink ; industry and play ; the uprisings 
and downsittings, the incomings and outgoings of 
men and women." * 

Thus English in character, Chaucer is the first 
national poet. This national force of the man is 
seen in many directions. His composition was 
fitted to interest all classes. Unlike the ballad or 
the romance or the treatise, it was directed to no 
one division of society, but brought amusement to 
all. It broke away from the literary traditions and 
restricted tastes of ranks and classes, and gave itself 
to general themes. This is especially true of his 
later and greater production, the Canterbury Tales. 
Nothing could be more broad and catholic than 
these, open to the Englishman as English, and to 
man as man. 

This nationality of taste is also seen in his uni- 
form choice of the English language. He early 
translated the Romaunt of the Rose, one of the 
most popular of French poems, by way of adding 
interest and grace to his mother tongue. He ac- 
quired that mastery over the English, that ease of 
versification and aptness of expression in it, which 
bespeak one in love with his language, aiding it and 
aided by it in equal proportion. This clinging to 
the national speech, the coarse vernacular, and 
building it up in literary beauty and strength, dis- 
close the truly national bent of his feelings and 
tastes. This, too, was at a time when the English 

* Chaucer's England, vol. i. p. 47. 



54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

had hardly emerged from the disgrace of its servi- 
tude, and when unimpassioned poets, like Gower, 
wandered far from the popular heart in Latin and 
in French. There was a national vindication and 
national service in this action of Chaucer ; and a 
flavor, therefore, of national gratitude should min- 
gle with our admiration of him. 

Again, Chaucer was a progressive poet ; not a 
radical reformatory poet, but one who always and 
easily perceived the line of improvement, and had a 
predilection for it ; chose to walk along it, at least 
so far as good fellowship would allow him. Thus, 
though by no means a reformer in the sense in 
which Wicliffe was one, and ready doubtless to 
render a general assent to the doctrines and even 
the superstitions of the church, he had a keen 
discernment of its many abuses in practice, and 
lashes the delinquents with unsparing satire. It 
is thought that he owed some of his predilection 
for English, and vigor in it, to an acquaintance with 
Wicliffe, and to the Piers Ploughman of Lang- 
Ian de. This poem, of a religious, satirical, alle- 
gorical and erratic character, fitted for popular cir- 
culation, was more vigorous and of sharper insight 
than any other production of the period save the 
works of Chaucer. " It was written with as intense 
an earnestness, and as untiring a search after truth 
as any production in the English language." * Its 
occasional felicity of expression and popular cast, 
its satirical and social features, constituted it a 
fitting study for the author of the Canterbury. 

* Introduction of the Early English Text Society, ms. v. 






chaucer's political spirit. 55 

Tales. It has also about the same measure of the 
reformatory spirit as that which fell to the works 
of Chaucer, though it is certainly written in a 
much sterner mood. While Chaucer fits his satire 
to his easy and ethically indolent temper, it is never- 
theless directed with unerring instinct to the right 
mark. 

He was equally progressive in his political 
spirit. The son of a trader of the city of Lon- 
don, he entered earnestly into the conflict of the 
mayoralty of the city in behalf of John of North- 
ampton, the candidate of municipal rights and re- 
form. The proximity of London to Westminster, 
and its growing commercial strength, made it jealous 
of court influences, progressive and liberal in its 
sentiments. For his participation in this contest, 
Chaucer fell under the displeasure of the court. 
His democratic sentiments appear also in his writ- 
ings, in the cast of his characters, and in the words 
he puts into their mouths. u Straw for your gen- 
tillesse," exclaims the host of the Tabard, and we 
feel that it is Chaucer, speaking out of a healthy 
English heart. He repeatedly expresses in full 
his estimate of rank ; as in the wife of Bath's tale : 

" But for ye speken of swiche gentillesse, 
As is descended out of old richesse, 
That therefore shullen ye be gentilmen ; 
Swiche arrogance n'is not worth an hen. 

And he that wol han pris of his genterie, 
For he was boren of a gentil hous, 
And had his elders noble and vertuous, 
And n'ill himselven do no gentil dedes, 



56 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Ne folwe his gentil auncestrie, that ded is, 
He n'is not gentil, be he duk or erl; 
For vilains sinful dedes make a -cherl. 
For gentillesse n'is but the renomee 
Of thin auncestres, for hir high bountee, 
Which is a strange thing to thy persone : 
Thy gentillesse cometh fro God alone. 
Than cometh our veray gentillesse of grace, 
It was no thing bequethed us with our place." 

The fundamental principle of human liberty is 
not merely set forth in this passage, but the 
grounds of it are vigorously urged. Thus, in the 
birth of the English nation, in the obscure begin- 
nings of that great controversy, which, ripening 
from generation to generation, has given form and 
character to English history, and achieved the liber- 
ty of the freest and most peaceful of the nations of 
the earth, a voice was found, the voice of hir first 
great poet, to ring forth the rights of manhood and 
virtue. 

In his own art, poetry, Chaucer was equally 
progressive, though he reaches his highest results 
by a growth rather than by a leap. The poetry of 
his time was made narrow and puerile by the ex- 
travagant and artificial sentiment of chivalry ; and 
by a tendency to obscure, trivial allegory. Both 
of these restraints Chaucer cast off, and at length 
reached a form of composition as direct, natural and 
entertaining as that of any of his successors. God- 
win says very strongly of him, "While the roman- 
tic writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
are not less exuberant than Homer in the descrip- 
tion of blows and wounds and fighting fields, Chau- 
cer has not prostituted one line to the fashionable 



ALLEGORY. 57 

pursuit."* We owe much to this better, broader 
tendency of Chaucer. His works helped quietly to 
displace the literature of chivalry, and to breathe 
into English letters a more serene and comprehen- 
sive spirit. We thus had no need of a Cervantes 
to arrest with satire the extravagance and feeble- 
ness of an effete system. This early acceptance of 
real, common life as his subject shows the humanity 
of Chaucer, and the penetrative, commanding char- 
acter of his mind. 

The taste for allegory was inwoven with that of 
chivalry, and resulted in conceits still more remote 
and fanciful. It was also united with a belief in 
enchantments, and a constant intervention of super- 
natural agents in the absorbing affairs of knight- 
hood. Acceptable allegory, from the artificial form 
of its composition, can occur but rarely in literature. 
It belongs, on the whole, to rude periods and un- 
cultivated minds. Device, cunning contrivance, a 
spirit of riddles accompany a state of semi-enlight- 
enment, in which the mind delights in its own gym- 
nastic feats ; not yet sobered by a clear, direct view 
of outward beauty, or brought down to a quiet 
search into the increasing wonders of knowledge. 
Early English literature is full of allegory, the rude 
mind being pleased with the play and illusion of a 
double meaning, when it cared little for the senti- 
ments involved. Moreover a predominant imagina- 
tion gave easy and perfect personification to ab- 
stract qualities, and Messrs. Do-well, Do-better and 
Do-best became an effective, substantial oli°;ar- 

* Life of Chaucer, vol. ii. p. 220. 
" 3* 



58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

chy in the kingdom of virtue. It was only when 
these and like conceptions came forth from the 
world of ideas as visible figures, ready, with ex- 
tended hands, to take partners, and become com- 
panions in the sports and labors of men, that alle- 
gory, freely entering the thoughts by the door of a 
vigorous fancy, exerted a controlling influence over 
the ordinary mind. Thus religion has never been 
able in illiterate periods to keep sufficiently in the 
background the tendency to personification, and 
angels and demons, swarming in on either hand, 
have overpowered the rational, voluntary life of 
man. This extravagance of allegory easily united 
itself to that of chivalry, and gave rise to produc- 
tions fanciful and puerile. The earlier works of 
Chaucer, The Court of Love, The Assembly of 
Fowls, The Flower and the Leaf, Chaucer's Dream 
were constructed under the influence of this prev- 
alent taste. The House of Fame is in the best 
vein of allegory, and the great poet is less ham- 
pered than another by the artificial and the false. 
It is plainly to be seen, that not till his later works 
did Chaucer win his entire liberty, and give himself 
fearlessly to the simple, native force of his theme. 
In the Canterbury Tales, allegory disappears, and 
we have once more the plain, pleasing conditions 
of daily life. 

In language we have already marked the pro- 
gressive spirit of Chaucer. He had the insight to 
see, and the feeling to greet, the strength of the 
new-born tongue ; and by this sympathy with 
rising greatness, and coming times, exerted an 



chaucer's dramatic power. 59 

influence incalculably more than would otherwise 
have fallen to him. His works in Latin would have 
been as seed stored under lock and key; in Eng- 
lish, they fell into a virgin soil, and with them, and 
under their shadow, have arisen the trees, shrubs 
and flowers of a broad, prolific land. 

We have thus far spoken of those general char- 
acteristics of the works of Chaucer which made 
them at the time especially significant; we now 
turn to their more intrinsic and peculiar qualities". 
Without central, creative force, these radiating in- 
fluences would have speedily fallen off. 

As the great work of Chaucer is the Canter- 
bury Tales, it is common, resting his merits on this, 
to speak of him as possessed of high dramatic 
power. Its general prologue contains a series of 
characters introduced with sharp delineation ; while 
the connecting prologues of the several stories pre- 
sent brief, but spirited, dialogue. These portions 
fall sensibly short of dramatic composition in its 
pure form, yet imply something of the same power. 
The dramatic writer is creative rather than descrip- 
tive, works from within, causes character to grow 
up before us from its living constituents in words 
and actions. The narrator, the novelist is as often 
descriptive as creative ; works by observation, and 
is more exterior to the circumstances and parties he 
delineates. Yet he cannot, though more aided by 
description, prosper by it alone. With true drama- 
tic force he must set his characters in action, and 
from time to time give them the play of lifelike dia- 
logue. The dramatist moves exclusively in the 



Oo THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

vigorous elements of speech and action ; the nar- 
rator supports his personages and unites his events 
with the lighter, more facile resources of descrip- 
tion. It may well happen, therefore, that one, like 
Fielding, should prosper as a novelist, and fail as a 
dramatist. Keen observation goes far to give suc- 
cess in the one undertaking ; while, in the other, 
this must have passed over into intuitive insight, 
and easy instinctive development. If, therefore, 
we withhold the term dramatic from Chaucer in its 
full, precise form, we must concede it in its rudi- 
ments, as expressing that pictorial power which 
deals in a living way with men and their actions ; 
and finds the characters whom it calls up propor- 
tionate, natural and pliant to its purposes. This 
power Chaucer possessed in a high degree, and the 
people of his tales come before us as a veritable 
troop of pilgrims, each with the mark of an individ- 
ual character and of a peculiar calling strongly on 
him. We come at the life of the century through 
this motley company, as they file out of the court- 
yard of the inn ; we reach its temper, and catch the 
flavor of its sentiments, as certainly as we do those 
of our own society in the streets of our cities. When 
the artist sketches them, trotting leisurely on, in 
loose array, marshalled by my host of the Tabard, 
we know them each and all ; they are as familiar to 
us in garb and carriage as the persons who, in apt 
illustration, face a descriptive page in Dickens. 

Chaucer, like all who excel in the delineation 
of character, was a master of humor and pathos. 
These are the light and shade of every human pic- 



HUMOR AND PATHOS. 6l 

ture, and must everywhere inter-penetrate each 
other in shifting proportions. They give to each 
other by contrast and by change intensity and re- 
lief. As light and darkness are expressed in de- 
grees, turn upon the diverse state of one element, 
so pathos and humor, the sober and the sportive, 
are one living, sympathetic impulse differently act- 
ed on, met by diverse forces in the outside world. 
The transition from one to the other is safe and 
easy, when the artist feels alike the force of both, 
and floats on an emotional current, that gathers, of 
its own bias, deep and sombre shadows under the 
overhanging bank, or glides gayly, noisily down the 
steep incline. 

Chaucer was strongly predisposed to humor. 
His serenity and good-nature led him into the sun- 
shine. He loved to take things lightly, occupied 
with their surface play, with only such brief glances 
into their mysteries and woes as would allow him 
to return with unbroken spirits. His humor is a 
well-meaning, pleasant sprite, that can only be sad- 
dened for a moment by the flying shadow of grief, 
and, easily shirking the burden, comes back with 
wonted good-nature and relish to the trifles, the 
haps and mishaps of intercourse. 

Closely allied to this sportive vein of Chaucer is 
his vulgarity. He has the sensual vulgarity of 
grossness, up to, or very nearly up to, his times. 
Yet it is not the sin, the filth, but the fun of the 
thing that he is after ; and so manifest is this, that 
we laugh away in part our irritation and shame. We 
feel that we have been caught, yet so fairly caught, 



62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

that we are unwilling to be angry. Laughter is 
wholesome, and the malignant spirits of irreverence, 
the impure spirits of unseemly jesting, are in a 
measure exorcised by it. As malarious vapor rapidly 
disappears under the open sky, and requires to be 
confined in a chamber, or shut up in a close court, 
to become deadly, so vice, held within a vicious 
heart, is tenfold pestilential, and shoots out through 
the bitter word, like a scalding jet of steam. With 
Chaucer, vulgarity lay under the broad heavens, an 
offensive fact indeed, but one with which he had 
no more to do than another. He chose to laugh, 
others might run away and hide, if they pleased. 
So much perhaps may be fairly said in extenuation ; 
yet these low, sensual features remain, a thing of 
bad significance. One needs to know the moral 
constitution of the recipient, or he may breathe pes- 
tilence in this atmosphere. If one goes to Chaucer 
for pleasure, he eats honey from the carcase of a 
lion ; while he feeds one sense, he may have occa- 
sion to close others. Yet with all we acquit him of 
the lasciviousness of later periods. 

While society is the chosen theme of Chaucer, 
he has a kindly love of nature. He treats of it 
without analysis and without interpretation ; but 
with a quick perception of its pleasant, cheerful, 
aspects. Thus he speaks of the morning in the 
Squiere's Tale : 

Up riseth freshe Canace hireselve, 

As rocly and bright, as the yonge sonne, 

That in the ram is foure degrees yronne ; 

******** 



THE POET NOT A REFORMER. 63 

The vapour, which that fro the erthe glode, 
Maketh the sonne to seme rody and brode : 
But natheles, it was so faire a sight, 
That it made all hir hertes for to light, 
What for the seson, and the morwening, 
And for the foules that she herde sing. 
For right anon she wiste what they ment, 
Right by hir song, and knew al hir intent. 

An exterior appreciation of the good and beauty 
of the world is the first spontaneous tribute of the 
poetic spirit to nature, an analytic, penetrative and 
spiritual interpretation of it belongs to a period of 
more reflection. 

From these characteristics of Chaucer, his 
national and progressive temper, his strong sympa- 
thies with men, his sense of the abuses under which 
they suffered, and his good-will to them, we see that 
he felt appreciatively the moral forces of his age, and 
that his genius ripened under them, both in the 
direction and form of his labors. He was not, it is 
true, a reformer ; artists as artists are rarely, if ever 
so. An urgent, cogent, ethical sentiment eats a 
man up, gives the soul an intensity and velocity that 
are sublime, perhaps, but not beautiful. The true 
poet of a period feels the moral elements at work 
about him, but is not driven by them. He is left 
sufficiently free to treat them artistically, aesthetically, 
appreciatively, with something of the patience and 
sufferance we find in nature, in the imperturbable 
tarrying of Divine Providence till events ripen. He 
has little of the haste, struggle, fierceness, over- 
estimates of reform. There is an affection in him 
for the present and the past, a catholic appreciation 



64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

of their beauties, an eye for their inner embryonic 
forces, which make him less headstrong in change, 
less confident of its results. He uses the ethical 
light that is in him not so much to cast deep 
shadows on the sins of the hour, as to bring out in 
bright relief its virtues, and to make each declining 
sun shed long beams of promise on the horizon, 
assuring us that the days hold each other and unfold 
each other with one continuous triumphant force. 
The great poet feels the ethical temper and working 
of his time, as one who tarries in the sunlight, not 
as one who works in it ; as one who enjoys it, 
rather than as one who is put to speed under it. 
Without a wakeful consciousness to moral elements, 
the mind is left opaque and feeble ; fiercely stimu- 
lated by them, it is thrown into discipleship, and 
achieves an epic, rather than writes one ; simply 
translucent and receptive under them, it breaks 
their solid beams into brilliant lines of color. 

Chaucer, like most men of unusual powers, 
gained the appreciation that has fallen to him some- 
what slowly. It is by some thought that in the 
esteem of his own times, and of those immediately 
subsequent, he scarcely surpassed Gower, of whom 
Lowell has said, " Our literature had to lie by and 
recruit for more than four centuries ere it could 
give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, so persistent a 
uniformity of commonplace in the Recreations of a 
Country Parson. "* 

Having thus presented the forces at work in 
the last half of the fourteenth century, and the 

* My Study Windows, p. 260. 



THE RETROGRESSIVE PERIOD. 65 

height to which genius carried them, we turn to the 
interregnum of English literature, the fifteenth cen- 
tury and the earlier portion of the sixteenth. This 
may be called the retrogressive period, and so sep- 
arated the times which preceded from those which 
followed it, that the problem of progress was taken 
up almost anew at a later date. Not only was noth- 
ing added to the ground gained in the fourteenth 
century, the genius of that period suffered eclipse, 
and was not disclosed again for two centuries. In 
Scotland, indeed, a literature more nearly corres- 
ponding to that of the fourteenth century in Eng- 
land found place in the fifteenth, and the deferred 
dawn of letters appeared in the north, with less 
brilliancy, under Dunbar and his associates. 

A chief reason for this barrenness of the fif- 
teenth century was the stern repression which met 
all free inquiry. " The University of Oxford chose 
twelve of its members to examine the writings of 
Wicliffe, and the report made presented two hun- 
dred and sixty-seven opinions which were described 
as worth of fire."* So voluminous and hot a cen- 
sure did this university, and with it all England, 
pass on him who first brought to it bold, free 
thought, and religious emancipation. Severe meas- 
ures were set on foot ; the reformation, as a forest 
conflagration, was extinguished. It was not, how- 
ever, completely trampled out; it sank into the 
soil, ran along the low ground, and smouldered in 
various places as the intelligence or independence 
of the common people gave it opportunity. The 

* Revolutions in English History, vol. i. p. 590. 



66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

hold which the new doctrines maintained on the 
popular mind is shown in a work entitled, The 
Lantern of Light, a fearless exposure of religious 
corruption; and in the martyrdom of Claydon at 
Smithfield. The reaction in the church, however, 
was so complete, that its upper orders became more 
than ever luxurious and licentious, its lower or- 
ders increasingly dissolute ; both uniting to suppress 
the present movement, and to provoke a new one 
more thorough and irresistible. 

The cause of religious liberty was identified, as 
it always must be, with that of intellectual freedom. 
Learning declined, especially at Oxford, and her 
scholars', through the poverty of her foundations, be- 
came " travelling mendicants," treated, at times, 
with the utmost indignity. Herein is a first and 
sufficient reason for the literary feebleness of the 
period. The bold proffer of life that was made it 
had been rejected, and the reactionary influences 
of vice, ignorance and superstition were in the as- 
cendant. 

A second, confirmatory force were the civil wars, 
which raged in the latter portion of the century. 
They involved little or no principle, were ambitious 
struggles for power, carried lawless violence every- 
where, and were thus thoroughly opposed to the 
peaceful and enlightened arts. The immediate in- 
fluence of these wars of succession was almost 
wholly evil, though they tended at length to con- 
solidate and strengthen society and government. 
This civil strife was greatly aided by the compara- 
tive independence and power of the nobles. Many 



WARS OF THE ROSES. 6j 

of these perished on the battle-field, or on the scaf- 
fold. They mutually broke each other in pieces, 
and when the succession was finally established in 
the strong hand of Henry VII. they were prepared 
to render an obedience more complete, and to fall 
into a position more subordinate, than ever before. 
The government was established on stronger foun- 
dations ; and later insurrections, like those of Suf- 
folk and of the Commonwealth, were in the interests 
of the people rather than of the nobles. The law 
of Henry the VII. forbidding to the nobles the main- 
tenance of retainers, other than domestic servants, 
shows at once how thoroughly the power of the 
aristocracy was broken. This pulverizing afresh 
of society, making way for a new, national aggrega- 
tion, w r as the chief beneficial result of the Wars of 
the Roses, and was ultimately, therefore, favorable 
to the more truly national life which belonged to 
the reign of Elizabeth. These wars helped to do, 
in the political world, what reform, at a later 
period, accomplished in the religious world ; and 
an arrogant nobility and an haughty clergy slowly 
sank to a level more consistent with national unity 
and national liberty. Separate centres of influence 
and intrigue were broken up, and all power began 
to go forth from the court, the government, the na- 
tion, the popular heart. 

The latter portion of the fifteenth century, 1474, 
was marked by the introduction of printing into 
England. This art, however, unfolded its vast re- 
sources very slowly. It offers means only, and de- 
mands a great and noble spirit for their use. For 



68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

the first fifty years of its existence, it was waiting 
for the power, that should lay hold of it, as a ready 
weapon, and smite with it the intellectual tyranny of 
the times. Its first labors were inspired by no 
great purpose, and were in part unfavorable to 
scholarship. Manuscripts were negligently repro- 
duced, and, displaced by their printed rivals, dis- 
appeared, rendering more difficult the careful edit- 
ing of later critical periods. There was, none the. 
less, slumbering in the press another of those pow- 
ers which were to make the next struggle for intel- 
lectual liberty so different in its results from those 
that had preceded. The bullet was not more 
fatal to the sway of the mailed knight than were 
the swift, prolific messengers of the press to the 
dominion of the religious and philosophical bigot. 
Invention, which has always found its home with 
the people, furnished the two weapons, which, more 
than all others, have levelled aristocracy and hier- 
archy, and put men in possession of their civil and 
religious birthright. The people have wrought 
most effectively in their own cause by that invent- 
ive power which is the best development of their 
strength. 

This period of subsidence, in which every re- 
pressive influence rushed in to submerge the ger- 
minant seeds of progress, presents as much to 
interest us in its prose as in its poetry, and offers 
but very little in either direction. On the one side 
are Pecock, Fortescue, Malory; on the other Oc- 
cleve, Lydgate, Skelton. We pass them all, mere- 
ly mentioning them that they may give a little dis- 



THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 69 

tention to a period that would otherwise collapse, 
and be lost to our literature ; a dreary one hundred 
and fifty years whose consolation is, that the down- 
ward here touched the upward movement, and 
passed into it. Out of this darkness leaped the 
day we hail with double delight. As this period 
drew to a close, in the vigorous reign of Henry VIII. , 
those forces were active, which were to shape the 
coming years of progress, and began to show in 
such men as Tyndale, Coverdale, More, Ascham, 
Surrey, the strength and diversity of later years. 

We now pass to the period designated as Eliza- 
bethan ; the first creative period of English letters. 
Times, like colors on the clouds, have no definite 
outlines ; they have centres, surfaces, directions, 
not margins. We gather into this period the ante- 
cedent causes which gave rise to it, and its own 
fruits ripening in times immediately subsequent. 
It is the period of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. 
It is clearly defined in the first, reaches its zenith 
in the second, and passes away in the third. As 
this is the great era of our literary history, and also 
the first of its stages of consecutive, derivative 
growth, we must study carefully its productive 
forces; those in which it had its origin. 

As we attribute very much of the superiority of 
this period to the ethical activity called out by the 
Reformation, we wish to inquire into the real value 
in progress of the ethical power. Some, like 
Buckle, have assiduously disparaged its influence in 
civilization. His view owes whatever of plausibility 
belongs to it to the limited meaning attached to the 



JO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

word moral. It is often restricted to religious ac- 
tivity, and even at that, to a dogmatic, formal and 
preceptive one. If we give to the word ethical, the 
compass which falls to it from the depth and activ- 
ity of the ethical sentiment in our constitution, we 
shall hardly afterward deny the important part 
played by this impulse in all periods of progress. 
Religious activity is but the more intense play of 
the moral nature, its movement under the leading 
facts of our spiritual relations in life. A false relig- 
ion is the most fatal of anodynes to the conscien- 
tious insight of the mind, and times of quiet 
submission to this external tyranny of priest, ritual 
and creed, should be instanced, not as examples of 
the activity of the moral sentiments, but of their re- 
pression and perversion. The fungi that feed upon 
a tree, consuming its native quality, are no measure 
of its own vital force. The moral nature is never so 
thoroughly put to sleep, and never so truly impotent, 
as in periods of corrupt sacerdotal rule ; in which ex- 
ternal authority is substituted for internal conviction, 
submission for virtue, and a ritual service for the 
guidance of a quickened conscience. If we were in 
search of specimen periods, showing what is possi- 
ble in art and literature aside from the moral nature, 
we should bring forward these moments of paraly- 
sis, of torpid and benumbed sensibility. On the 
other hand, reform in religion, a reasserting of indi- 
vidual rights, a resurrection of private thought, in- 
terpretation, conviction, constitute the spring-time 
of ethical sentiment. Though the movement may 
be partial, so far as it goes, it is a rebellion of con- 



INFLUENCE OF THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 7 1 

science against usurped authority. Civil liberty 
and the love of liberty are to be pronounced upon, 
not during the stretches of despotism, but in those 
halcyon days in which every man's blood tingles with 
hope, desire, achievement ; nor in those only, save 
as the end is wisely proposed, the labor successfully 
consummated. 

All that activity, then, within the field of religion 
by which truth has struggled to cast off error, the 
better to abolish the worse tendency, the freer the 
more servile one, appeal being taken to the moral 
nature of man, to his own convictions, is the product 
of ethical force, whose seeds are always in the soil, 
and sure, when the reign of winter relaxes, to find 
their way to the light. This appeal, to the individ- 
ual life may not always be direct ; it may be made, 
in the first instance to history, or to the Bible, or, as 
by Voltaire, to practical intelligence ; but it underlies 
none the less every other appeal, since history and 
the Bible and practical intelligence must have inter- 
pretation ; and this can only be given by the indi- 
vidual to the individual. Even if we abrogate our 
own powers in behalf of those of another, or those 
of a set of men, this new bill of disfranchisement 
we must first consider, and put to it our own seal; 
we catch at least a gleam of light, though we see fit 
to quench it again. 

Hence periods of struggle in belief are pre-emi- 
nently ethical periods, and also periods of intense 
individuality and personal activity, accompanied 
with an exalted sense of power and responsibility. 
The whole nature of man is lifted by this inspira- 



72 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

tion of independent guidance and government, this 
walking alone with truth, this gathering, under the 
eye and favor of God, into his own hand the lines 
of control, and going forth to achieve a life that 
shall fulfil a private, and thus a general, purpose. 
If there are possibilities in men, these periods of lib- 
erty, of ethical strength, of a central movement for- 
ward, can not fail to develop them. 

Nor do the infidelity and unbelief which are sure 
to belong to these eras of progress at all militate 
with this view of the force of the moral sentiment, 
they rather confirm it. Unbelief that is positive, 
that is asserted as a right, that passes into a crusade, 
does so by virtue of the moral nature, directly and 
indirectly. Liberty is a claim and a passion with it. 
The mind, irritated by a perpetual, persecuting 
tyranny, wanders in mere wantonness, for a little, be- 
fore it will accept any principle that may become to 
it a fresh yoke in the school of enforced belief. The 
licenses of skepticism are often reactions against im- 
perious faith ; as are those of liberty the resent- 
ments which have sprung up under the maddening 
hand of irresponsible power. The effervescence of 
thought is due to the revolt and ferment of the 
moral nature, the nature which resents wrongs and 
claims rights, the nature that thinks of the fitness of 
thought, and with indignation of any opinion, creed 
or custom that would smother thought. Whether 
the mind of the devout reformer is primarily delighted 
with the truth ; or, less devout, but not less free, is 
pleased with its own exhilarating search for it, the 
fact is the same ; it is the return of the mind to its 



INFLUENCE OF THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 73 

powers, its liberties, its responsibilities ; and this 
is an ethical victory. 

Even if the point of advance is one of science, 
of mere knowledge, the opposition it meets with, if 
any, is likely to come from the moral world, to be 
a religious anathema ; and the counter assertion, 
therefore, will necessarily be one resting on a moral 
basis, the mind's right to the truth, its right to its 
own powers, and to whatever God has sealed under 
them as its inheritance in his intellectual and spir- 
itual kingdoms. Liberty is the starting-point of 
science, liberty to inquire, accept, reject ; but the 
battles of liberty have been fought, and must be 
fought in connection with religious truth, that truth 
that involves immediate duties and dangers, and is 
involved in all the cogent concerns of this and an- 
other life. Hence the secondary struggle must 
share the fortunes of the primary one, the skirmish 
must go as goes the battle, and we shall only be 
intellectually, aesthetically free, as we are spiritually 
free. The ethical element finds place in every con- 
flict because it is so pervasive, fundamental ; and 
while it may seem merely to cover the retreat of 
error, it heads the advance of truth. 

We have said, that those who depreciate the 
moral sentiment should look for excellence to 
periods of superstitious repose ; they may also look 
for it to times of passive unbelief, mere negation, 
that cares little for what it denies, and is not even 
earnest in the denial. Quiet, tacit belief and un- 
belief fall off alike, though on opposite sides, from 
ethical power ; and so far as there is good in either 
4 



74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

of them, any invention, any bold realization of the 
undertakings or pleasures of life, we concede it to 
be the fruits of secondary impulses ; we make it 
over to purely intellectual action. 

How can it be otherwise than that the ethical 
sentiment, as we understand it, should be large- 
minded, bold, creative ; and that all that has been 
creative, bold, large-minded in any art, should, at 
least tacitly, have claimed this liberty, and ex- 
ercised this inspiration. Secondary impulses give 
secondary qualities, but the primary impulse of 
great and pervasive power is this freedom of the 
mind, its right to see, to judge, to act; its sense of 
a destiny, and of its power to fulfil that destiny. 

We are prepared, then, to put down as first, and 
first to consider, among those general conditions 
which made a great epoch out of the Elizabethan 
age, the unusual activity of religious, polemic 
thought, breaking the narrow bounds of minute 
dogma, and resuming its hold on principles. To 
this first influence we add, as one with it, sustaining 
to it the relation both of effect and cause ; second, 
the revival of learning, more especially classical 
learning ; third, the earlier steps toward scientific 
progress ; fourth, discovery ; and fifth, invention. 
We shall speak of each of these general conditions 
from which date our modern civilization, before we 
turn to those special causes which helped to develop 
our first creative period — an era so brilliant in itself, 
and so influential on all that have followed, that in 
understanding it, we start in possession of the secret 
springs of our consecutive, literary history. 



LECTURE IV. 

Forces at work on the First Creative Period, (a) Activity of Re- 
ligious Thought, (b) Revival of Learning, (c) Scientific De- 
velopment, (d) Discovery, (c) Invention. 

Secondary Influences, {a) Classical Knowledge, (6) Italian Lit- 
erature, (c) Quiet Reign of Elizabeth, (d) Chivalrous Senti- 
ment, (<?) Growth of Popular Influence, {/) Kinds of Lit- 
erature. 

The ethical forces of the sixteenth century, of 
whose claims to influence we have spoken, disclosed 
themselves in a religious struggle which affected the 
entire Latin Church, and resolved itself, in different 
places and between different parties, into every de- 
gree and every diversity of strife. It was a dissolu- 
tion of old beliefs, with a reformation, under local 
and individual tendencies, of many new shades of 
faith. This, which was the reproach of the refor 
mation in the eyes of the Catholic, was in fact its 
chief merit. Men were not passed from one over- 
shadowing organization to another, but were com- 
pelled, amid endless phases of belief, to think and 
act with relative independence. 

We have in John Morley an able and independ- 
ent witness, who says, in his treatise on Voltaire, 
" Protestantism was indirectly the means of creat- 
ing and dispersing an atmosphere of rationalism, 
in which there speedily sprang up philosophic, theo- 
logical and political influences, all of them entirely 
antagonistic to the old order of thought and insti- 

(75) 



j6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

tution. The whole intellectual temperature under- 
went a permanent change, that was silently mortal 
to the most flourishing tenets of all sorts.* 

Whatever was the cause of the great fruitful- 
ness in letters of the last portion of the sixteenth, 
and of the earlier half of the seventeenth century, 
no such general, pervasive force ; searching into all 
ranks and relations of society, existed at that or 
at any subsequent period as this of the Reforma- 
tion. The leading events of the political world all 
turned upon it for more than a century. From the 
amours of Henry VIII. to the tragedy of Mary 
Queen of Scots, every stirring event in English 
history either drew its passion from the relig- 
ious sentiment, or was strongly colored by it. 
Foreign policy and domestic policy were alike in- 
separable from religion. The regency in Scot- 
land ; the relation of England to the Netherlands 
and to Spain ; the sense of power that came to 
her in exerting a controlling influence on the con- 
tinent, while maintaining peace in her own borders, 
turned one and all on diversities of faith. The 
great political names and events of the period, 
both in England and on the Continent, are indis- 
solubly interwoven with religious controversies, 
Gustavus Adolphus, Charles V., Philip II., Henry 
VIII., Mary, Elizabeth, the rise of the Netherlands, 
the struggle of the Huguenots, the settlement of 
the new world, the growth of constitutional liberty 
in England. 

Nor was the influence of religious differences in 

* Voltaire, p. 86. 



DESTRUCTION OF THE MONASTERIES. *]>] 

the domestic relations of England less manifest. 
To say nothing of that perpetual strife, passing 
under Mary into an extensive and bloody perse- 
cution, which pervaded English social and politi- 
cal relations during the sixteenth century, on the 
ground of conflicting faiths and rituals, what one 
change could have been more sweeping, or have 
altered, in a more striking way, the face of society, 
than the overthrow of the monasteries, so numer- 
ous and so venerable. A measure of this char- 
acter, wholesale and sudden, was attended with 
very mixed results. It greatly diminished the 
popular reverence for religious orders, and rapidly 
reduced their hold on the public mind, both by 
the exposure of the corruption of these institutions, 
of the religious tricks which had been practiced in 
them on the credulity of the masses, and also by 
that sudden loss of prestige, which, with the many, 
attends on misfortune. The burden of a large un- 
productive class was lifted from the people, and 
industry and independence gained a victory over 
indolence, deception and exaction. For these 
gains there were compensations. Valuable manu- 
scripts may have been lost ; communities, in part 
devoted to scholarship, to popular instruction, and 
to charity, were broken up ; and the support of 
the most worthless and vagrant of the monks was 
shifted, not escaped. No well rooted abuse gives 
way without tearing up the soil somewhat, and in- 
volving local interests in its fall. 

The direct literary influence of the Reformation 
is nowhere more manifest than in England. The 



yS THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

h : stery of the English Bible presents it in the 
clearest light. Our present version has held un- 
questioned supremacy for more than two centuries 
and a half; has been found, in later periods, in 
almost every English household ; has received 
weekly enforcement from innumerable pulpits ; 
and been the direct occasion of a large share of 
the printed matter that has come from the English 
press. It has thus exerted a literary influence, 
greater in volume beyond all comparison than has 
fallen to any other book. The works of Shake- 
speare may have affected single minds, from a 
literary point of view, more strongly than the Bible, 
but the style and language of our version, aside 
from its religious authority, have exercised a con- 
trol incalculably "greater on our general literature. 
We may instance Bunyan's Allegories, whose 
merits have never been surpassed in their own 
field, as among those productions which have 
sprung directly from the Scriptures, bulbets half 
inclosed in the parent bulb. No such complete 
and prosperous dependence can elsewhere be found 
in our literary history, as this between the Bible 
and many of its literary offspring. This version, 
so influential, arose with corresponding painstaking, 
and under a most fortunate concurrence of influ- 
ences. Tyndale, by his translation of 1525, began 
the work. The masculine vigor of the man, the sim- 
plicity and earnestness of his purpose, and its popu- 
lar bent, together with the prevalent Saxon features 
of our speech, united to give this early and most 
influential rendering of the Scriptures an idiomatic 



TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 79 

force and directness which it helped to impart to all 
the versions that followed, and the more easily as 
many of these arose under kindred conditions. For 
nearly a hundred years, version followed version, 
with constant comparison, and with a firm hold on 
previous and cotemporary work. At length with 
fearless revision, yet with deserved deference to 
former editions, appeared the authorized version, 
the fruits of the ripest scholarship, at home and 
abroad. The labors of the century were gathered 
up in it. Catholics, churchmen, dissenters, men 
of varying belief, had virtually labored upon it. 
The hands of martyrs had wrought in it, Tyndale, 
Rogers, Cranmer ; and so it prospered by violence 
and by favor, till at length it came forward under 
the solemn endorsement of the English Church, 
and tacitly of the nation, its own work through its 
most devout scholars, its varied beliefs, and the 
years of its most intense religious life. It has 
thus grown into a reverence and honor among 
us, which lead us to draw back from change, and 
to forget, when further revision is thought of, that 
bold, diligence to which its own merits are due. 

Correspondingly did the Bible gain in general 
influence. In 1543 the translations of Tyndale were 
proscribed by parliament. Any portion of the 
Bible, under penalty of imprisonment, was denied 
to "women (except noble or gentle women), artif- 
icers, apprentices, journeymen, serving men, hus- 
bandmen, and laborers." This was a remnant of 
the hostility with which his work had been met at 
the outset. But previously to this, the Great Bible 



80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

had been opened in the churches for public reading, 
and many earnest and disputatious groups had 
gathered about it. "Classes and households were 
divided. On the one side were the stern citizens 
of the old school, to whom change seemed to be 
the beginning of license ; on the other young men 
burning with zeal to carry to the utmost the spirit- 
ual freedom of which they had caught sight."*" 

The withholding of one rendering only gave oc- 
casion to another ; and that the partisans of both the 
Bishop's Bible and the Geneva version, represent- 
ing the extremes of religious sentiment, should 
finally have accepted King James' version is a 
proof of the candor and carefulness that gathered 
into it the excellencies of previous work. A wider 
circulation of the Scriptures, a more profound in- 
terest in them, and a better understanding of them, 
were thus the fruits of the jealous advocacy, the 
earnest attack and defense of successive editions. 
That a kindred spirit prevailed on the continent, 
though in a less degree, is seen in the fact, that, 
in addition to Latin versions, a French, an English, 
an Italian, and a Spanish Bible, proceeded, in a 
brief period, from Geneva and Basle. 

Incident to this religious activity, this earnest 
and critical study of the Scriptures, there was a 
large amount of theological composition. Writers 
of this class have always been numerous in Eng- 
land. It is true, indeed, that the productions of 
but very few of them have obtained an acknowl- 
edged position in our literature, but they have not 

* History of the English Bible, p. no. 



THEOLOGICAL COMPOSITION. 8 1 

for that reason failed to have a powerful hold on the 
national mind. Forces for the moment very effi- 
cient, frequently miss any direct mastery over later 
periods. They reach these in their influence only 
by being absorbed into earlier times, and thus 
swelling the stream as it flows by. Immediate and 
remote control turn on different principles. If one 
is so in sympathy with his own generation as to 
impress himself strongly, actively upon it, he almost 
necessarily passes away with it. If one, in his 
works, catches a prophetic forecast of coming truth, 
or an excellence of art that has not been reached, 
he naturally fails of appreciation by those about 
him, and waits for the opening doors of a coming 
century before he finds his own audience. Each 
man casts anchor as he may, early or later in the 
stream of human life, and holds fast where first, 
with ploughing flukes, he begins to grapple the 
popular mind. Most theological composition springs 
from a present exigency of thought, and tarries 
with its direct work in the times which evoke it. 
Nevertheless, in shaping those times, it is most 
efficient, most diffusive, and, above all forms of 
production, gives that undertone of social senti- 
ment by which artistic work is to be controlled. 
What the Raphaels of the world are to paint is de- 
termined by what they find in it, in its heart, its 
affections, when they come. What the Miltons 
of the world are to sing must be settled by the 
themes which win men's thoughts. Theological 
composition, therefore, has always affected literature 
beyond its literary merit, since it has not been 



82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

by this merit that it has acted, p-A by the moral 
tonic there has chanced to be in it for men's minds. 
Great waves spring up only on deep and large 
waters ; theology deepens and broadens that intel- 
ligence whose rise and fall in art constitute the 
record of literature. 

Polemics are not instantly favorable to literary 
art, but rather the reverse. It is not till the first 
crackling flame abates, and genial, ruddy coals re- 
main on the hearth, that men settle down with slip- 
pered feet into that state, at once active and placid, 
that favors art. The headstrong impulses of re- 
form are unfavorable, in their first expenditure, to 
the coy, creative play of the imagination ; but, if 
successful, they are sure to be followed by the suit- 
ors of art, entering gayly into the larger life that 
has been won for them. In a general way, the na- 
tions of Europe rank in literature according as their 
moral life has issued in honest, searching specula- 
tion, or in blind belief and unbelief. It has been 
characteristic of Italy and Spain, that they have 
fallen, in a powerless, unfruitful way, into supersti- 
tion and infidelity, each passive and hopeless like 
the other ; and neither of these states have reached 
the literary life of which they gave the promise. 
France has had a bolder, more decisive infidelity, 
provoking a more critical and earnest belief, and 
she has ripened a correspondingly extended litera- 
ture. Germany has been held, especially in mod- 
ern times, in vigorous conflict by a most searching 
and critical belief and unbelief, and her intellectual 
labors have been prodigious, her literature surpass- 



THEOLOGICAL INFLUENCE. S3 

ingly fruitful. England, above all European nations, 
has been marked by sober, thoughtful, predominant 
belief, often disturbed, but never shaken, by skepti- 
cism; and she presents a literature certainly as 
varied, as abundant, as continuous, as powerful as 
that of any other nation. The foundations of this 
ethical strength were laid in English society, just 
previous to the Elizabethan period, the first creative 
period in our literary art. 

The traces of this theological action are also in 
our language. A large accession of words of 
Latin origin came to it in the sixteenth century. 
The style of More and Ascham, of the early part 
of the century, is purer and simpler than that of 
the prose writers of the Elizabethan age. There 
are in these, both an increase of Latin words, and 
a more complex, involved construction. An easy 
narrative style gives place to one of weighty and 
complicated thought, to assertions laden, not merely 
with a primary purpose, but with many secondary 
and qualifying ideas. The sentences often march 
with a heavy regimental tread, as if each were a 
section, or a company, in itself. They drag along 
formidable words, and loosely attached clauses, like 
heavy guns, and are only saved from being tedious 
and cumbersome by the vigor of the thought, or the 
vividness of the imagery. Grammatical relations 
are not simple, or closely knit, and sometimes fail 
altogether. This tendency to roll up the sentence 
in masses, this plethoric habit of thought, a con- 
struction crowded full of conditions and adjuncts, 
with its natural accompaniment of a Latin vocabu- 



84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

lary, belonged to prose composition all through this 
first creative period. This style was the product 
of vigorous thought, of active and uncritical facul- 
ties, that delivered sentiments in the gross, waiting 
for a period of more leisure and art to break them 
up, sort and arrange them. 

The following passage from the Areopagitica of 
Milton, illustrates the swelling sentence, the fresh 
spring torrent of thought. 

* " First, when a City shall be as it were besieg'd 
and blockt about, her navigable river infested, in- 
rodes and incursions round, defiance and battell oft 
rumor'd to be marching up ev'n to her walls, and 
suburb trenches, that then the people, or the 
greater part, more then at other times, wholly tak'n 
up with the study of highest and most important 
matters to be reform'd, should be disputing, reason- 
ing, reading, inventing, discoursing, ev'n to a rarity, 
and admiration, things not before discourst or 
written of, argues first a singular good will, con- 
tentednesse and confidence in your prudent fore- 
sight and safe government, Lords and Commons ; 
and from thence derives it self to a gallant bravery 
and well grounded contempt of their enemies, as if 
there were no small number of as great spirits 
among us, as his was, who when Rome was nigh 
besieg'd by Hanibal, being in the City, bought that 
peece of ground at no cheap rate, whereon Hanibal 
himself encampt his own regiment." 

While the revival of classical learning tended to 
these results in style, they were in part also the 
fruit of polemics. Theological discussion has so 



HOOKER. 85 

much of it taken place in Latin, that its vocabulary 
is closely united to that language ; while its logical 
forms of assertion and limitation, statement and ex- 
ception, tend to involved and composite sentences. 
Hooker, the first great prose writer of the Eliza- 
bethan age, shows the best results of the theologi- 
cal habit of mind. Sound, searching and liberal in 
thought, he presents a style massive, semi-fluent, 
pushing and formidable ; yet from time to time 
breaking into a more easy and animated flow. By 
universal consent, he takes rank among great Eng- 
lish writers. A tendency which could thus early 
ripen an author of so much power and skill, could 
get to itself such a head, vindicates easily and at 
once its claims to large literary influence. 

The second agency which gave the conditions of 
the creative period was the revival of classical learn- 
ing. The middle of the fifteenth century witnessed 
the final overthrow of Constantinople, and a general 
dispersion westward of Greek scholars and litera- 
ture. These first found shelter in Italy ; the condi- 
tions were favorable for their reception. A progress 
in classical learning followed, which, during this 
and the following century, with a fluctuating move- 
ment, extended throughout Western Europe, Eng- 
land being among the latest to feel it. This classical 
scholarship stood in diverse relations, at different 
places and different times, to the spirit of reform. 
It preceded and accompanied it, rather than fol- 
lowed it, in Europe. In Italy, the popes welcomed 
this revival, and it there chiefly accelerated art, then 
passing forward to its great achievements. Art felt 



86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

a double tendency, a Christian bias and a classical 
one, or — in contrasted language — a pagan one. It 
gave itself, on the one side, with devout belief to 
religious themes, and, on the other, to the resusci- 
tation of Greek and Latin mythology.- When en- 
countered by no strong reformatory current, classi- 
cal knowledge tended to this division of effects. 
Some added it as mere culture to previous charac- 
ter ; and others, awakened as from a dream to this 
wonderful Greek and Roman world, so full of civili- 
zation and art, yet without a Christian faith, them- 
selves lost the sense of necessity and certainty in 
their creed, and became skeptical of a system that 
could in so many things be taught of the past. 
Classical art and classical letters, so alien to Chris- 
tianity, could not win their aesthetical hold on the 
sentiments without weakening the foundations of 
belief already feeble, and introducing feelings quite 
out of harmony both with the purity and the cre- 
dulity of former faiths. Thus there was an opportu- 
nity given for the formation of an opinion adverse to 
the classics, as impure, irreligious, heathenish. 

There was another, however, and very different 
relation which this knowledge came to assume. The 
appeal being very universally taken by reform to 
the Scriptures, a spirit of searching inquiry into 
these sources of truth sprang up. An extended 
acquaintance with Latin and Greek became a ne- 
cessity to the reformer, if he would master old, or 
form new, versions of the Bible ; and classical 
scholarship allied itself closely, in Erasmus, Luther, 
Beza, Tyndale, and many others, to the Reforma- 



CLASSICAL LEARNING. 8? 

tion. This was especially true in England, so that 
to call one a Greek, a lover of Greek letters, was 
equivalent to pronouncing him a heretic. While 
this was the deepest and the prevailing affinity of 
the new culture, it met with variable favor accord- 
ing to the wisdom of times and parties. 

Classical learning, then, both by belief and un- 
belief, both as an instrument and a discovery, as 
giving a deeper hold on the facts of revelation and 
redisclosing the facts of an earlier world, wrought 
liberty, enthusiasm, progress. Greek and Latin 
letters have ever since been strongly influential on 
English literature, with a power varying primarily 
with the knowledge and tastes of the individual, and 
secondarily with the age to which he has belonged. 

An unfavorable literary result of this revival of 
knowledge, were the conceits and pedantry of style 
to which it led. Not only was the language em- 
barrassed and choked with its new words, remote 
allusions, tricks of expression, dodges of thought, 
became popular, and vitiated, in a measure, the 
composition of even the best writers. Knowledge 
overpowered invention, and the resources of ex- 
pression its simplicity and purity. This tendency, 
in an earlier form, is especially traceable to Lilly, 
and from one of his works is named Euphuism. 
He himself characterizes it as a thirfg of "fine 
phrases, smooth quips, merry taunts, jesting with- 
out meane and mirth without measure." Later, 
assuming the form of pedantry and a play upon 
words, it constituted a distinguishing feature of the 
school of writers termed metaphysical. It evidently 



88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

finds no direct support in classical composition, nor 
indeed in any knowledge, but was rather a fashion, 
springing from a pedantic and facetious play of 
thought, with resources not yet wholly bent to 
simple and worthy service. 

A next general force, though as yet very feeble, 
were the incipient movements of science. These 
were felt in Italy as early as the close of the fif- 
teenth century. Leonardo da Vinci was followed 
in the sixteenth century by Galileo, whose labors 
gave rise at the opening of the seventeenth cen- 
tury to a vigorous Italian school in natural philoso- 
phy. Copernicus and Tycho Brahe and Kepler 
were taking the first steps of progress in Germany. 
Natural science did not achieve large results in 
England till the next period ; but it now found at 
least one great mind in sympathy with its spirit 
and methods, and able to expound them. All rec- 
ognize the wonderful force of thought that be- 
longed to Bacon. Craik thus chronicles the gen- 
eral impression: — "They who have not seen his 
greatness under one form have discovered it in an- 
other ; there is a discordance among men's ways 
of looking at him, or their theories respecting him ; 
but the mighty shadow which he projects athwart 
the two by-gone centuries lies there immovable, and 
still extending as time extends." * This command- 
ing position was gained, not by actual discoveries, 
not by a sufficient, much less a final, exposition of 
the laws of progress ; but by a thorough and 
large apprehension of the general character and 

* English Literature and Language, vol. i. p. 613. 



BACON. 59 

value of the new inductive method, which had 
scarcely come into clear appreciation even with 
those who were using it ; was directly opposed to 
prevalent modes of inquiry ; and was destined, by 
its expansion in every department of science, to 
rule the future, and constitute its chief glory. In- 
ductive as opposed to deductive reasoning ; obser- 
vation as contrasted with speculation ; a careful, 
cautious inquiry into things as compared with logo- 
machy, a loose legerdemain of words, had as yet 
found no sufficient presentation. This task fell to 
Bacon. He thus confirmed and hastened on the 
new movement by justifying it to "itself, by bring- 
ing it into the presence of a clear and well-sus- 
tained theory, and by exalting its immediate and 
practical value. Those who came after Bacon in 
natural science, both in England and elsewhere, 
were glad to recognize this statement and defense 
of their method, and accept the force of this great 
mind, which had made a way for them ; which had 
pronounced, with such insight and power, upon the 
bent and value of the new philosophy. Bacon thus 
practically announced, compacted and organized an 
intellectual movement, the most fresh and fruitful 
of any within the Christian era. It mattered little 
that he unduly depreciated the deductive* logic ; 
that he missed of seeing that it makes up with in- 
duction the double enginery of thought ; that Aris- 
totle commands a moiety of the realm of mind : it 
k^mattered little that he failed skilfully to use his 
own- system, or master its details of application ; he 
did conceive clearly, vigorously the new direction, 



90 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

the new purpose, the new method of inquiry, and, 
establishing and defending it, he passed it over to 
others to develop and apply. In this later genera- 
tions have busied themselves, and, surprised anew 
in every decade with the abundance of their re- 
turns, they yield larger and larger honor to him, 
who, in such ringing, penetrating tones, proclaimed 
"fruit" as the object and test of inquiry. Bacon 
fell in readily with the external, practical cast of 
British thought ; nay, he gave it the most emphatic 
and influential statement it has ever received. He 
looked upon the mastery of the physical world as 
a great end of knowledge, saw how careful and 
thorough must be the observation which should 
lead to this result ; how cautious must be that 
transfer of things to thoughts, of objective realities 
into appropriate conceptions and language, if we 
would not have our reasoning illusion, a dodging 
from one empty form of expression to another ; and 
how many prejudgments, the mere debris of habit, 
individual or social, hide the truth, and require to 
be cleared away before the virgin rock is again laid 
bare. 

Bacon, indeed, failed to understand the scope 
of his philosophy, the varied resources, the diversi- 
fied ingenuity of thought, with which it was to be 
carried into all branches of physical knowledge ; 
but this was a matter of course, since the centuries 
that have intervened have only partially revealed 
the subtile analysis and diversity of method requi- 
site in the different lines of inquiry. 

While Bacon gave this positive push to physical 



BACON. 91 

science, he indirectly affected less favorably intel- 
lectual and moral science. His influence tended 
to the oversight of that large element of deduction, 
which mental philosophy must always present ; and 
to fasten on ethics the utilitarian temper that per- 
vades physical inquiry. We may look upon him as 
indirectly a source of that materialistic philosophy 
and those prudential morals which have found so 
much acceptance with Englishmen. We would 
make no unkind inference, but in Bacon's own his- 
tory, utility, in the low bent of its aims, egregiously 
miscarried, and a life of magnificent scope and con- 
comitants fell into reproach and shameful estimate. 
Bacon lacked practically, as he did theoretically, 
the upward bias of pure reason ; insight into tran- 
scendental truths, letting drop their motives from 
heaven, not gleaning them in prudent husbandry 
from the earth. 

The religious and the scientific spirit thus fur- 
nished to the Elizabethan age its two great prose 
writers, Hooker and Bacon, and from that time 
onward, the passing collisions and slow coalescence 
of these two tendencies have been most fruitful in 
thought. Science has been aggressive, religion has 
stood on the defence, and deeper insight, sounder 
opinion, more philanthropic sentiment, have sprung 
from the conflict. In style, Bacon united to logical 
power a vigorous imagination. Language thus com- 
pounded, like transparent glass, lets in not only light, 
but with it, and incidental to it, image after image 
from the outside world, and makes of vision a feast 
to the soul. His essays best present him as a writer. 



92 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

A fourth general force, rousing the national mind 
to activity, was the national enterprise, the geo- 
graphical discoveries of the period. We can hardly 
appreciate the mental expansion, the breaking down 
of boundaries, the sudden rarity, that came to 
thought by the discovery of the new world ; or the 
precision and unity imparted to geography and as- 
tronomy by the circumnavigation of the globe. 
The diameter of the globe, a first unit, a standard 
of reference in celestial calculations, was thus se- 
cured ; and we might now know from what we went 
forth, and to what we returned. Classical learning 
restored the by-gone world, exploration disclosed a 
new world, laden with new hopes for the future ; a 
fresh realm of romance and possibilities brought 
along side, moored to, the old historic continent, 
exhausted and wayworn. The English, in the last 
portion of the sixteenth century, were entering 
heartily into these discoveries, were full of the in- 
quiring, adventuresome spirit they begot. They 
added enterprise to discovery, and, as in Drake, 
helped themselves to Spanish wealth, as opportunity 
offered, with a temper as unscrupulous as that with 
which the Spaniard won it. At no time has the 
world seen more daring and resolute navigators, 
mingling large and petty motives into enthusiastic, 
serviceable character. Drake, Frobisher, Davis, 
Raleigh lead the nation in that maritime enterprise, 
which has ever since given expansion to the na- 
tional character. The additions which such a tem- 
per brings to literature may not be very palpable, 
and in their most palpable forms are no sufficient 



INVENTION. 93 

index of the entire effect. The nautical novel has in 
part expressed tins predilection of Englishmen, and 
serves to show how bold and breezy national tastes 
have been kept by this love of the sea. The poet- 
ry, the direct results of these sympathies, as Byron's 
apostrophe to the ocean, offers, in an outspoken 
form, what is always a latent element in English 
character, imparting scope and strength to feeling. 
A final agency we have to mention as introdu- 
cing the new epoch is invention. The two early 
inventions, the conditions of later ones, giving 
general safety and general knowledge, were slowly 
working their effects into and transforming so- 
ciety. Gunpowder and the printing press, both 
democratic, the one lifting up the middle class in 
intelligence, the other tumbling down the aris- 
tocratic class from their pedestal of personal 
prowess, unhorsing them with utmost ease as they 
pranced on their mail-clad chargers, were progress- 
ing in serviceableness, adding to themselves those 
concomitant inventions, on which their value de- 
pends. Cannon and small arms in the one direc- 
tion, paper, type, and their easy mechanical appli- 
cation in use in the other, grew out of these 
initial steps, and have again and again shifted 
their forms and methods of production, as these 
inventions have shown the power that is in them. 
In the Elizabethan period these secondary steps 
were well under way, and the blind giants of me- 
chanical force were getting to work at those stu- 
pendous labors they have since accomplished. As 
warming up by their activity, they make contemp- 



94 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

tible all previous exertion by that which follows, 
we are ready to cry, Hold, this will ruin us ; an- 
other book, another paper, and we are buried in 
hopeless ignorance under this multiplicity Qf the 
material of knowledge ; another monitor, another 
needle-gun, another mitrailleuse, and we are un- 
done, having lost all our labors thus far, and sunk 
the value of past production in this omnipotence of 
a too headlong, incautious present. 

The success of the reformation was due, in 
large part, to the aid given it by the press. New 
versions of the Bible, rapidly scattered, gained and 
confirmed the popular mind. Persecution was far 
less efficient, and it became impossible to hunt out 
and eradicate the multiplied and inconspicuous mes- 
sengers of reform. The incentives to literary labor 
were also slowly on the gain. Authorship ceased 
comparatively to be an expense, gradually became 
remunerative, and now may bring a princely for- 
tune. There came to it also a compensation quite 
as valuable, the pleasure of wide influence, of send- 
ing out a work that should go in a silent way to un- 
known households, and bespeak the kind attention 
of strangers. The intellectual world was gathered 
in large assemblies by this invention, and listened 
with redoubled interest to the rapid responses 
drawn out. 

Gunpowder brought to an end barbaric inunda- 
tions ; gave the civilized nations a vast superiority 
over the uncivilized ; put them in easy, immediate 
possession of the world, as the Spaniards and Eng- 
lish on this continent ; between themselves lodged 



INVENTION. 95 

power with those most progressive, and inventive; 
transferred the arts of war yet more from the body 
to the mind ; and, without exorcising the savage 
fiend of strife, put restraint upon it, and made it 
more just in its rewards. Not only was the civilized 
world made impregnable to barbarism ; and barbar- 
ism surrendered everywhere to civilization ; not 
only did invention become the basis of power ; the 
physically weak were armed with weapons that 
made them formidable, and mere bullying became 
comparatively impracticable. Invention, the best 
product of the laboring mind, took increasing pos- 
session of that mind, gave it thoughtfulness, and 
weight in the councils of men, and made it heedful 
of the intellectual life about it. Invention, commit- 
ting the implements of war to the hands of industry, 
rendered national wealth an essential feature of na- 
tional power. War became a question of finance ; 
and the manufacturer, merchant, broker, citizen, 
proportionately gained power in its decisions. Those " 
who created, and those who held, wealth, were prime 
factors in the product of national greatness ; a city, 
a seat of industry, became a centre of strength ; and 
the productive, economic forces, gaining their true 
position, lifted up with them the popular element. 

No later inventions are comparable with these 
initial ones, in their transforming character, unless 
it be that of the application of steam as a motive 
power. This has wonderfully compacted the world ; 
shifted its centres and methods ; and permeated it 
everywhere with the most rapid, interlaced and 
composite circulations. But these gains, marvellous 



g6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

as they are, would have been utterly impossible 
without the previous safety, science and civilization 
due to gunpowder and the printing press. 

Such were the general and growing conditions 
of activity in this creative period. A wakeful at- 
tention had come to men in all departments, and 
while in religion they were claiming the rule of 
their own spirits ; in science, discovery, invention, 
they had entered on the rule of the world. 

We have now occasion to speak but briefly of 
the foreign and domestic influences which acted in 
a more limited way on the Elizabethan age. Chief 
among the first was classical scholarship. The 
most vigorous translation of Homer, that of Chap- 
man, belongs to this period. The great poets were 
either thoroughly permeated with the classical spirit, 
and laden with its poetical images and myths, like 
Milton ; or were, like Shakespeare, cognizant of these 
works of the past as standards of taste, and an un- 
failing source of material. No poet was so inde- 
pendent as not to feel somewhat this restored life, 
and the most commanding drew on its wealth with 
the utmost freedom. The nearer and freer le- 
gends of mediaeval and chivalrous life, however, 
mingled with the classical story, and were often 
the weightier element of the two. 

The second foreign influence was Italian litera- 
ture. This was more controlling than in any pre- 
vious or subsequent period. It disclosed itself in 
translations of Tasso and Ariosto; in constantly 
returning Italian themes in the English drama, as in 
Romeo and Julie ( ; in poetical measures, as in that 



SURREY. 97 

of Spenser; and in the kinds of poetry. Surrey 
was most immediately the medium through which 
Italian poetry affected our literature. A translation 
of two books of Virgil by him gave the first exam- 
ple of English blank verse, a form taken from Italy. 
He also introduced under the same influence son- 
nets, so long a favorite variety with our poets, and 
gave a beginning to our lyrical poetry. Lyrical 
poetry, as the product of subtile, refined sentiment, 
falls to a somewhat late period in national devel- 
opment. Its origin in Southern France, and cul- 
tivation in Italy had been the result of the extreme 
development of chivalry, and the languid refine- 
ment of Southern tastes. These chivalrous senti- 
ments belonged in a high degree to Surrey, and 
united him, on his visit to Italy, with an easy nat- 
ural affinity to its literature. Yet an English tem- 
per so far aided him, that his composition showed 
more simplicity and sobriety than his models, and 
we have in him the lyric spirit with little of that 
extreme vaporing tenderness which had begun to 
attach to it in Italy. He was followed and aided 
in this branch of poetry by Wyatt. Thus Italy 
gave us, through one in whom the rough English 
character was subdued to utmost courtesy, our 
earliest lyric strains, single notes from its sunny 
vineyards and olive groves, floating northward to 
our more rugged climate, dropping as they came 
their heat of passion, and taking in its place the 
glow of manlier sentiments ; as coals that ceasing 
to smoulder burn again in the draught of strong 
winds. 

5 



98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Most noticeable of the domestic forces that 
affected the period was the firm, peaceful, conserv- 
ative government that fell to the long reign of Eliz- 
abeth. As advanced as any English rule had yet 
been, unless it be the brief reign of Edward VI., in 
religious liberty, and in its general policy, it never- 
theless held firmly to its own ground, checking 
rather than -quickening progressive elements. 
Though the new, in Protestantism, as opposed to 
the old, in Catholicism, was accepted, that division 
of elements which resulted in Puritans and royal- 
ists was still incipient, and thrust back by an author- 
ity at once strong and popular. Peace at home, 
with a sense of power and responsibility abroad, 
prevailed, and kept the national mind alert in the 
midst of leisure. An intense antagonism to 
Spain, and the faith represented by it, animated 
and consolidated the national sentiments. 

Another marked feature of this reign, enhanced 
by the sex, position and character of Elizabeth, was 
the chivalrous spirit which belonged to the court 
and nobility. Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh 
were men of a fascinating character, and one which 
attached to this particular period in history. That 
which was most truly refined and just in chivalry 
lingered longest ; as a perfume, overpowering at first, 
becomes sweetest as it is ready to pass away. A 
gentle courtesy and subdued undertone of admira- 
tion gave a color and flavor to society not other- 
wise obtainable, and tinctured strongly poetic sen- 
timent. Chivalry, as a controlling institution, om- 
nipresent, imperious, smothered as much virtue as 



SOCIAL STATE. 99 

it called forth. It lay a damp, heavy cloud on the 
landscape ; when it lifted here and there, if it re- 
vealed glittering surfaces, they were decked with 
cunning frost-work, rather than with healthful, spon- 
taneous life. But now, when the sun had been for 
some time up, when these exhalations of the night 
were about to pass away, they softened down into 
a warm, roseate mist, casting the lightest shadows, 
and giving the most unspeakable charms. 

Literature still belonged almost exclusively to 
the upper classes, but these had been increased in 
the cities by many rich citizens, into whose hands 
power was daily falling. They were growing up to 
be that body of the nation, to which nobility is as 
secondary as pauperism. Dramatic literature was 
far more comprehensive than romance literature, 
and gathered a more promiscuous audience. In 
the reign of Elizabeth, remnants of slavery were 
still found, and husbandmen led a coarse and brut- 
ish life ; vagrancy and crime were inadequately sup- 
pressed by severe laws, unequally administered. 
Sixteen hundred executions are put down as the 
yearly average in England alone, and seventy-two 
thousand fell to the entire reign of Elizabeth. 
While, therefore, the wealthier classes were numer- 
ous enough to call forth and reward the genius of 
Shakespeare, they were still in close contact with 
an unkempt population, the coarsest staple of 
human kind. Amid the losses of such a state, 
there was this gain, that thought and speech pre- 
served a straightforward, vigorous, idiomatic tone, 
ready to do rough service in rough places. 



IOO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

This fact served to hold in check those changes 
incident to the revival of learning. Latin words 
spread more slowly into the body of speech, and 
popular forms of composition, as the drama, were 
less choked by them. The dramatic writers of the 
period were usually graduates of the universities, 
and also men of the world ; they united two vocab- 
ularies, a classical and a popular one, and thus had 
power above and below. 

This period presents both branches of literature, 
poetry and prose ; though the former has a decided 
ascendancy in quantity and quality. We have 
abundant prose, however, faithful to its own func- 
tion, a presentation of truth ; and this with an ex- 
cellency of manner which gives it a place in litera- 
ture. Prose, more earnest and less artistic than 
poetry, more single and less popular in its pur- 
pose, born of thought rather than of feeling, ne- 
cessarily reaches literary excellence later. "Thus 
during this entire period, while poetry was mount- 
ing to a point which it has hardly since transcended, 
prose remained more or less embarrassed by its 
own resources, and labored through unwieldy sen- 
tences, not native to the vigor of our tongue. It 
did its work by strength rather than by skill, and 
reached by power what it missed in grace. Prose 
had come to a manly birth, but was waiting to be 
bred by the repose and cultivation of later times. 

Poetry, vigorous^and creative though it was, had 
not fully recognized its own province. Many sub- 
jects were treated by it more appropriate to prose, 
and giving no sufficient play to the imagination 



THEMES OF POETRY. IOI 

The form of poetry should co-exist with a poetical 
substance, and if the theme be essentially didactic, 
it is in vain that it is loaded with the imagery of 
the fancy. Stone good for a wall may be too coarse 
for statuary; topics, admirable in prose, yield in- 
sufficient feeling to poetry. Examples of these un- 
poetical themes are, The History of the Civil Wars, 
a poem by Daniel ; Nosce Teipsum, a Proof of Im- 
mortality, by Davies. In so vigorous a period it was 
natural that plants should spring up at points that 
could not finally afford them nourishment. The 
just division of the field of literature, giving to each 
portion its own products, was a later growth of 
judgment and taste, one not yet quite complete. 



LECTURE V. 

Influence of Climate on National Character. — Spenser. — Shake- 
speare. — Milton.— Spenser's Character. — His Relation to the 
Past. — Faery Queen. — Character as a Poet. — The Drama. — 
Classical, French and English Drama. — Origin of English 
Drama. — Shakespeare, power of, morality of. 

So many are the causes involved in any com- 
plex effect, that an oversight of a portion of them 
is inevitable. It is also natural, that once made 
aware, in a particular direction, of this neglect, we 
should forthwith give the newly discovered agent 
more than its share of weight. The same partial, 
the same limited power of the mind, is shown alike 
in its too restricted and its too intense appreciation. 
Thus, having waked up to the fact that soil and 
climate have something to do with national charac- 
ter, we hasten to the conclusion, that these are the 
chief and controlling forces in its formation ; and 
that the families of men are but a higher flora, a 
more varied fauna, whose tendencies and capacities 
are impressed upon them by their environment; 
taking care to include in this, not merely the miner- 
alogy of the earth, the meteorology of the heavens, 
the make of the land, — its mountain fastnesses, or 
open plains, its secluded position or commercial ad- 
vantages — but also the accumulated results of these 
forces long since wrought into the national stock. 
Thus the serious and sombre phases of English 

(102) 



EFFECTS OF CLIMATE. IO3 

character, its stern purpose and stolid animality, its 
severe restraints and brutal outbursts, its vigorous 
moral conflicts with itself and with others, are as- 
cribed to the climate of England, damp and deject- 
ed, often driving the inhabitants into indoor life, 
putting them to effort in their pleasures ; and to its 
soil, low-lying, fertile, penetrated and close bound 
by the sea, yielding no hilarity, no exhilaration of 
sunshine and upland to the spirits, yet rewarding 
labor with plentiful food ; more generous to diges- 
tion than to imagination, more liberal in utilities 
than beauties. We are not disposed to deny, and 
we strive not to underrate, these physical influ- 
ences ; but they are far from sufficient to explain 
fully any type of national character. We find no 
reason for this entire transfer of causation to the 
physical world, as if mind went for nothing among 
primitive forces. Lands do not yield given nations 
as they do given fruits, under defined qualities of 
soil and limits of temperature ; and if they did, in 
this correlation of conditions and products, there 
would still be included the inscrutable living agency. 
Irish character, ripened under much the same phys- 
ical conditions with English character, is yet very 
unlike it. Races have varied and independent en- 
dowments, and by constitutional and acquired bias 
either control or greatly modify the effects that 
reach them from the external world. 

The ethical quality which undoubtedly belongs 
to English as contrasted with French character 
is not a result of climate. It exists in very dif- 
ferent degrees in the three political divisions of 



104 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

the empire, Ireland, Scotland, England ; and the 
explanation of this varying intensity is to be found 
in the religious history of each of these sections. 
The force of religious ideas, their form of manifes- 
tation, have been very distinct for centuries in Eng- 
land and in France ; and this fact, on which the 
character of each nation to-day hinges, has not 
been the result of diversity of soils simply, but of 
sentiments as well, of a variety in the ingredients 
of manhood rather than in those of matter, in the 
way in which free, unique and responsible powers 
have been unfolded. Into this national complexity 
have entered many forces, but supreme among 
them all have ruled those pristine elements which 
make up character, first individual, then national ; 
establishing themselves at points, thence enlarging, 
interlacing, and growing into a net-work of living 
and relatively homogeneous dependencies. Certain- 
ly we cannot concede a primitive power to the plant, 
to the material molecule, and deny it to man. 
So Germany, side by side with France, and so Spain, 
stand each contrasted with it in national traits. 

National character is not something superin- 
duced from without ; is not rugged features, grim 
facial outlines, and a gruff bearing caught from the 
cold peevish air, from the warfare of man with un- 
generous nature ; it is not a mood of the heavens, 
which, by sympathy, he has gradually transferred 
to his own constitution, casting this in the same 
mould, with the same strife of tendencies ; it is 
rooted in deep, measurably independent, constitu- 
tional forces, abiding with him as their centre ; even 



INDIVIDUALS. 105 

as matter possesses a character, ami is faithful to 
it. Thought, manners and literature receive their 
coloring from the way in which this national germ 
shows itself in the mind and heart of a people, as 
a distinctive, national type. 

Having seen the general influences at work on 
and through English character in the Elizabethan 
period, we now turn to consider what individual 
creative power added to them, what it wrought be- 
yond the range of results level to the time and pe- 
riod in its graded, normal activity. There are al- 
ways in a great age here and there significant clus- 
ters of forces to which we can only give an individ- 
ual name, whose power we cannot trace beyond 
those wonderful personalities in which they inhere ; 
men who make the period as well as are made by it. 
In this era we dwell upon three of these, Spenser, 
Shakespeare and Milton. We know of no necessary 
causes which laid down the frame-work of powers 
for any one of these three men ; yet through those, 
powers came, in large part, the Elizabethan age. 
Without these three it might have been a high table- 
land, with them it adds thereto some of the no- 
blest altitudes of the globe. 

Though all working under the conditions pre- 
sented by the period, these men stood in very dif- 
ferent relations to it. The bent of his own genius 
decided for each the form of his works, and gave 
them a very diverse direction. Spenser looked stead- 
ily toward the past ; was quietly conservative in his 
temper, and dreamy in his cast of mind. Milton 
turned to the future. Fiery, almost fierce in pur- 

5* 



106 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

pose, under the strenuous impulse of principles, 
he reined in thought and imagery alike to the firm 
march of ideas. Shakespeare's time is the present, 
an omnipresent present, that roots its creations any- 
where, and sets them a growing under the sunshine 
of the hour, as easily and freely as if that place and 
time were all the earth. 

We speak first of Spenser. The past with its 
imagery, its illusions, its pomp of life, and poetical 
dreaminess, descended upon him, and completely 
drank up his quiet, unpractical spirit. With restless, 
yet untiring importunity, he sought from queen and 
courtiers those means which should leave him to the 
free indulgence of his tastes. He congratulated 
himself 

" That even the greatest did not greatly scorne 
To heare theyr names sung in his simple layes, 
But joyed in theyr praise." 

Though adulation was not a grateful task to 
him, he was content to prosper by it, rather than 
turn to those practical, commonplace labors that 
command subsistence. 

" Calme was the day, and through the trembling ayre 
Sweete-breathing Zephyrus did softly play 
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay 
Hot Titians beames, which then did glyster fayre ; 
When I (whom sullein care, 
Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay 
In princes court, and expectation vayne 
Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away 
Like empty shadows, did afflict my b.ayne,) 
Walkt forth to ease my payne 
Along the shoare of silver streaming Themmes." 

Irritated by delay and ill success, he complains, in 






SPIRIT OF SPENSER. IOJ 

his Teares of the Muses, of the overshadowing in- 
fluence of polemical discussion. He regards it as 
the creeping forth of "barbarism and ignorance," 
instead of the restlessness of a new era. The fas- 
tidious poet, anxious only to set in order one more 
vision of the past, had little sympathy with any dis- 
cussion, however vital, " without regard or due de- 
corum kept." He knew nothing of the germs of 
greater centuries yet to come that were budding 
under his feet. He was only in haste to participate 
in the pageant of life that was passing, or to escape 
to the poetic glories of the life that had already 
passed. 

Spenser was a poet, not a philosopher ; his mind 
was more fruitful of images than of judgments. 
Appearances had so strong a hold upon him as to 
conceal underlying principles. Such minds are slow 
to -leave realities, a good achieved and a like good 
dreamed of, to embark on an ocean of revolutionary 
ideas in quest of new worlds. There is enough in 
the present, to call forth desire, enough in the past 
to furnish the decoration and tinsel of their dreams. 
They are forced onward by no sense of pervasive 
wrong, nor pressed to labor for a future cast in a 
better mould. If patriotic, they find patriotism in 
loyalty ; if devout, devotion attaches them to the 
hoar and ven Table institutions of the established 
faith. They overlook its evils, and chasten and 
subdue its spirit to their own quiet, trusting moods. 
Such was Spenser. He asked only to dream, and 
he thought it hard that men would not at once give 
him the opportunity of dreaming, and share with 



108 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

him his delight in the glowing imagery of his visions. 
This pleasure at length came to him. In the retire- 
ment of Kilcolman, Ireland, on an estate granted 
him by Elizabeth, he composed the larger share of 
his works, above all the Faery Queen. Adown this 
flowing vision, as along a pure, gentle, beautiful 
winding stream, he floated many a long summer's day, 
and never reached its end. However, as the gift of 
the queen lost something of its grace by the strong 
rapacious hand which plucked it from the heart of 
Ireland, so the poet did not escape the retribution 
which clung to it. An insurrection broke out in 
this land of chronic violence. His house was burnt, 
an infant child perished in the flames, and he fled 
to England, where he died shortly after. Justice 
and repose are exotics in this unfortunate island ; 
they neither cling as hardy shrubs to its hillsides ; 
nor are they successfully planted by a fostering 
hand in its cultivated fields. 

Spenser gathered up his chief strength in one 
poem, the Faery Queen. This, though so far su- 
perior to the past as not to be of it, bears through- 
out an archaic impress. It is the genius of the writer 
that holds it aloof from its affinities, lifts it above its 
kin, and puts it among the best productions of the 
new epoch, while belonging in type and form to the 
tedious and dreary works of a retreating age. It 
is allegorical, a device by which so many drooping 
imaginations had striven to give motion to dull 
themes : Hawes, writing of Dame Commyte, and 
Lady Grammar, and Dame Logic. It seemed to be 
thought that by the trick of a name the life of poetry 






ALLEGORY. . IO9 

could be made to descend upon and quicken the 
merest rubbish of knowledge ; that a personal appel- 
lation would bring breath to the nostrils of any the 
rudest image of clay ; that a title, however ill be- 
stowed, had all the charms of rank at its command ; 
and that Lady Grammar, born with such ease of 
this formal fancy, was as veritable, sympathetic and 
inspired a being as any of the brood of poetry. 
Thus also a little later, Fletcher, in his Purple Island 
undertook the absurd task of allegorizing into poetry 
an anatomical description of the human body. Spen- 
ser's poem is an allegory, and great notwithstanding ; 
partly, perhaps, because he often strays so freely, 
unmindful of the perplexed, tangled and broken 
threads of primary, secondary and even tertiary de- 
pendencies he has left behind him. Allegory puts 
the steed of the muses in harness ; it must draw by 
hill and by valley ; descending to the ocean or 
mounting along the clouds its moral is ever behind 
it, and with a pedler's precision, it drops a precept at 
every door it passes, or adds it may be some new la- 
ding of didactic import. The ingenuity of the alle- 
gory is also at war with the inventions and freedom 
of the poet. It gives him a line along which he 
must move, rather than leaves him open to impulse, 
at liberty to choose any way and all ways. Allegory 
is a cunning method of getting rollers under a truth 
too heavy to be moved by hand, an ingenious device 
for sliding a forgotten, unacceptable block of percep- 
tive lore into the way of the workmen, as they rear 
the building of national or private character. It 
is essentially didactic, and hardly of service even in 



IIO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

instruction, where the mind of the pupil is vig- 
orous, receptive and eager. To be acceptable 
in a lengthy form it must be accompanied, as in 
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, by vigorous personi- 
fication, often sweeping into forgetfulness its indi- 
rect lessons, and swallowing up the mind with first 
impressions. Apollyon makes as good a fight as 
Cceur de Lion. 

The allegory of Spenser is at times, as in parts 
of the first book, quite direct ; but more frequently 
the poetic fancy spurs freely forward, and leaves her 
didactic companion to hobble on as he may, or to 
tarry, till taken up again on some more sober and 
easy excursion. 

The imagery of the poem, long and varied 
as it is, is all drawn from chivalry. It thus 
wanders through a past already becoming to the 
cotemporaries of Spenser remote and unreal ; an 
unlocated, enchanted, and vast forest, roamed 
over by men and women magnified in every 
quality, fanciful in action, extravagant in emotion. 
The thoroughness with which the mind of Spen- 
ser was imbued with the sentiment of chivalry 
is astonishing. He is never at a loss. He brings 
forward his knights and ladies in exhaustless va- 
riety, and enters upon each new combat, with 
fresh spirit, and lends it novel incidents. Chiv- 
alry was not with him, as with the court of Eliz- 
abeth, a courtesy of intercourse, a gloss of man- 
ners, the lingering splendor of a bygone life ; his 
poetic sentiments, his virtues, his sober thoughts, 
all responded to it, all sprang into being under its 



CHIVALROUS SPIRIT OF SPENSER. Ill 

conditions, marched forth under its banners, van- 
quished or suffered defeat under the guise of its 
heroes. A certain shadowy, unreal character ne- 
cessarily falls to the personages of the poem, so 
wholly are they the children of the fancy, so little 
of realistic or historic light is there in the eye that 
marshals them, so much of interpretation, of personal 
and local rendering. They play a part to the 
mind so fictitious and conventional, aside entirely 
from allegory ; are so simply its own creations, that 
we watch them and move with them, in a dreamy, 
unreal way. Moreover the whole country, the field 
of their exploits, is one unmapped, with no earthly 
whereabouts. It enlarges before us as we move 
into it, and, an unknown region, holds any and 
everything in reserve. Its surprises fail to surprise 
us, so evidently are its creations feats of poetic 
legerdemain. 

Hence it is, that the Faery Queen, though a nar- 
rative poem, is rather a panorama of visions, a series 
of dreams, in which old characters return to us from 
we know not whence, and new ones meet us, and 
provoke no inquiry into their origin ; causal con- 
nections are lost sight of; anything and anybody 
are anywhere, that is where they chance to be 
wanted, where the fancy puts them ; and we, suffi- 
ciently occupied with the light, easy interplay, as in 
a night vision, put no questions, and make no com- 
plaints. 

One result of this, however, is, that the poem 
gets no movement as a whole ; there is no direction 
in the stream ; like the dragon's tail, it is "in knots 



112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

and many boughtes upwound." This was inevit- 
able. The plan of Spenser predetermined the re- 
sult. Twelve virtues, headed by religion, rose be- 
fore the mind of Spenser ; the discipleship of 
private morality, to be followed by twelve others, 
the guardians of public faith. To each was to be 
devoted a book of twelve cantos, with its own 
champion, its own suitable adventures, and inci- 
dental relations to the Queen of Faery Land, and 
to Arthur, its model knight. These virtues be- 
came indistinct in personification, features blended. 
The adventures of their respective heroes lacked 
suitableness and variety, the multiplied figures in 
motion lost identity, whirled on in a maze of un- 
unreal achievements, and remained interesting only 
by the grace and novelty of their evolutions. It 
was impossible on this slight plan to give either 
progress, connection or division to the poem ; the 
result actually reached was inevitable. The labor 
was too great even for the strength of Spenser. 
Every step exhausted the imagery and interest at 
his disposal ; the allegorical thread was often 
broken, even lost for long periods together ; simi- 
lar positions reappeared ; and he was not able 
again to reach the elevation and consistency of the 
first book. 

In length also this poem belonged to a past 
which deemed nothing tedious, felt little of the 
hurry of time, and waited patiently for the end 
of the longest and laziest action. The concentra- 
tion and energy of intellect which characterize an 
age of achievement were scarcely known. Writers 



FAERY QUEEN, A -RELIGIOUS POEM. II3 

in philosophy and poetry spun, like ever patient in- 
sects, inexhaustible webs for simple and meagre 
ends, their work often hanging in the winds without 
one poor fly to grace the issue^ This gentle, yet 
undying motion of Spenser, in which he seems 
borne on by the innate vigor of the imagination, 
rather than by any purpose in view, any necessity 
of the action, situation or characters, is seen in his 
full and rich comparisons. The metaphor delays, 
not the thought, impels it on rather ; is the long, 
sudden, startling leap it takes in reaching its object. 
The classical comparison, on the other hand, rolls 
on in stately fashion, like a large orbed wheel ; or 
even spins pleasantly on its axis without progress. 
This is with Spenser a favorite figure. 

The Faery Queen is not merely a moral, it is a 
religious poem. His own words are applicable to 
him. 

" The noble heart, that harbours virtuous thought, 
And is with child of glorious great intent, 
Can never rest until it forth have brought 
The eternale brood of glorie excellent." 

His was a devout and earnest mind, and this it 
was that enabled him to transfuse riotous war, and 
at times sensuous imagery, with a gentle and pure 
spirit. His work was a dream, a panorama of 
dreams, an unending sport of the imagination, an 
easy circling flight of fancy, and his scenes lose 
the cruel passions of conflict, the grossness of lust, 
and the contamination of physical contact. We 
wander with him backward and forward through 
his vague land of visions, as free from soil as the 



114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

sunlight, glancing lightly on the clean and the 
unclean. 

Spenser was one of those sincere, imaginative 
spirits who need never forsake the past, no matter 
how dark and evil its fashion, for they find not the 
mischief that is in it ; they subject it to their own 
impressions, casting over it the indistinctness of 
evening light, concealing deformities, magnifying 
distances, and bringing even to coarse common 
place an undefinable harmony. Like a glorious 
sunset, Spenser closed a long dark day with a 
splendid vision. As such a sunset is said to give 
the promise of the hours next to open, so he 
borrowed the force and spirit of the Elizabethan 
age, that he might render the new in prediction 
on the fading sky of chivalry. Spenser was a 
poet for poets. He brings inexhaustible refresh- 
ment to the imagination. We are not compelled 
to read ; we wander as in a beautiful garden, we 
rest at pleasure, at pleasure resume our walk, or, 
restored in spirit, leave it altogether. From this 
mellow light of Spenser, which is at once evening 
and morning, we pass to Shakespeare, who gives 
us the bold, clear discoveries of midday, and that 
a gala day, in which foreigners and citizens of 
every rank crowd and jostle each other in the 
streets, sport in the public squares, move in pomp 
along the thoroughfares, and make of life a grand 
ever varying spectacle. 

Among the art forms of the Elizabethan era, one 
was pre-eminent, the drama. It engrossed the 
best talent of the time, and attained an eminence 



THE DRAMA. I I 5 

from which, later productions of the kind have 
fallen rapidly off. The English drama, though 
not altogether alone, is peculiar in form. Its pur- 
pose is by dialogue purely to unfold striking 
phases of character, grouped in action either 
about a single or several leading personages. 
With careless and vanishing distinctions, it main- 
tains two forms, that of comedy and that of 
tragedy, both elements easily uniting in the same 
play, with a general preponderance of the one, 
sufficient to define and confirm the ruling senti- 
ment. The English drama is quite unlike the 
classical, and also unlike the French drama. The 
latter occupies a position somewhat between the 
other two, lays more stress than the English play 
on the elegant, easy evolution of the dialogue, 
the intellectual tournament of thought and senti- 
ment ; cares, less for variety and force of inci- 
dents, and for the vigor of character which these 
express ; clings far more closely to the forms 
and rules of the art as shaped under classical 
models ; and is intolerant of the broad, bold, 
easy, careless sweep of events found in the works 
of Shakespeare and of his cotemporaries. The 
classical drama rests on another idea, and occu- 
pies the other extreme from that which falls to the 
English. The chorus, stationary in the centre of 
the stage, rehearsing many events, giving lyrical 
utterance and interpretation to the restricted 
action as it progressed, was the formal, the con- 
trolling,' external feature of the Greek drama, and 
led to a limitation in time and place, and in the 



Il6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

number of actors, quite foreign to the spirit of 
our stage. The force or inner power of the 
Greek tragedy is as peculiar as its form ; it is 
a rapid, mental change under a sudden accumula- 
tion of events, the quick rending of a soul by a 
final Nemesis, its struggle with forces gathering at 
once with fearful intensity. This gives it the nature 
of a catastrophe ; the spirit being searched, Job- 
wise, through and through by the din and rever- 
beration of multiplied calamity, by the sharp, light- 
ning strokes of judgment. 

The English drama owes its form to its histori- 
cal origin. It was not the product of a pure and 
critical sesthetical sentiment; a keen relish of a 
complete, concise and symmetrical image. It 
moved leisurely, laughingly, with varied and pro- 
tracted enjoyment, through a series of events, 
loosely united by ordinary causes ; because it had 
slowly grown up by a presentation, rather than by 
a concentration and idealization, of facts ; and en- 
joyed these in their native flavor and spirit. Its 
idealization lay rather in increasing the relish of 
events, making them spicy with humor and passion, 
than, as in the Greek tragedy, in selecting, com- 
bining, compacting them into one hungry ordeal of 
woe, over whose blistering ploughshares, with naked 
feet, the victim was to hasten on as he could. 

The miracle play, dating back as far as the 
twelfth century, rehearsed to the populace in the 
monastery, or in the streets of the city, the Bible 
history, accompanied with the rudest caricature, 
the coarest joke, the most incongruous additions. 



EARLY PLAYS. I 1 7 

The history was greatly humbled, but it was made 
real, and put within the reach of the grossest 
minds. If Gabriel, the messenger sent to Mary to 
ask her if she would be God's wife, loses all celes- 
tial complexion, and issues forth on the rude service 
of a feudal lord, yet the three parties are present, 
in vigorous presentation, to all minds. The miracle 
plays were accompanied and followed by the morali- 
ties, with a broader range of subjects, the lives of 
saints and legendary church history. These again 
gave occasion to the interludes, shorter and yet 
more secular pieces; and these by slow gradations 
to that comic and tragic rehearsal of events which 
constituted the earliest drama, and ripened into the 
scenes of Shakespeare. The later secular forms 
slowly took the place of the earlier religious ones, 
while, from beginning to end, the play was a free 
representation of events more or less remote from 
each other, and animated by a comic or tragic sen- 
timent. Thus the English drama owes its final 
form to its free and historic development, and its 
real spirit and power to those great artists who laid 
hold of it as it was, and unfolded it according to its 
inherent character and tendencies. A verdict, grow- 
ing in unanimity with each advancing year, has 
placed Shakespeare first among dramatic writers. 
Though honored by his cotemporaries, this position 
certainly was not by them granted to him. Beau- 
mont and Fletcher were more sought after. Web- 
ster includes him, yet with secondary commenda- 
tion, among those of whom he cherished a good 
opinion. Shakespeare is not merely in advance 



Il8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

of the play writers of his own and of subsequent 
times, but so far in advance as to leave a long 
unoccupied stretch behind him. The galaxy of 
writers associated with him, clustering thick, 
with varied and brilliant powers, about him, owe 
their supreme impression to his over-balancing 
light. No one of them can stand comparison with 
him, and each of them sinks before the eye, when 
singled out for the purpose. The plays, for in- 
stance, of Jonson, all weigh light when put con- 
jointly against one of the superior dramas of Shake- 
speare. 

The time of Shakespeare was indeed favorable 
to his genius, but that time was shared by Beau- 
mont, Fletcher, Massinger, as well, and left the 
busy, fertile writers, that swarmed up into the 
warm, creative sunshine of that day, to drop into 
comparative oblivion. One light only burns clear 
for all ages through the haze of intervening years, 
and its pre-eminence therefore must be attributed 
to those independent personal powers which genius 
holds within itself. The times may furnish ma- 
terial, may give or remove limitations, but the 
germ of growth is ever in the mind that harbors 
it. The one inscrutable force, which no philoso- 
pher can fully explain, is Shakespeare himself. 

Close communion with men, free, bold, unre- 
served — men of vigorous limbs, strong appetites, 
impetuous passions, and many of them of keen in- 
tellect ; a language receiving large additions, un- 
trammelled by criticism, pliant and productive in 
the hand of masters ; society awakened by new 



SHAKESPEARE. 119 

thoughts and stirring convictions, just conscious of 
the life of coming centuries that was rising within 
it, and not as yet heated and parted by religious 
and political passion, nor filled with the limited and 
headlong bias of conflicting elements ; these were 
the conditions under which Shakespeare, and with 
him many more of like occupation, grew up in 
strength, in London, the centre of English life ; 
ripened their powers in the daily use of them in 
their chosen avocation ; themselves on the stage, 
saw and felt constantly the conditions of success 
and failure ; and entered into the most direct, in- 
tense, living experience of the principles of their 
art. These were rare circumstances, rare forces, 
but Shakespeare was rarer than they all.; Without 
him, and the few who stood nearest to him, dark- 
ness would have overtaken that epoch as easily as 
another. It would have disappeared as the flush of 
one among an hundred sunsets, and been thought 
of no more. 

What were these powers of Shakespeare, by 
which this age is made inextinguishable by the cen- 
turies which roll over almost all things the darkness 
of oblivion, brushing from the earth the life of to- 
day, that they may make ready for that of to-mor- 
row ; armies camping where many another has 
camped, yet without intrusion, collision of spears 
or clatter of musketry ? The drama calls above 
every other form of composition for the rapid, va- 
ried, complete creation of character. This power, 
this complication of powers, Shakespeare possessed, 
and it was his art. Characters that are strongly 



120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

conceived, entire and living, take care of them- 
selves, as easily and inevitably as do the men who 
are like them. It is the imbecile and the mechani- 
cal only that are in the way, either in nature 
or in art. A true character contains and com- 
mands a plot; while a plot that runs before its 
characters, leaves them all manakins. Whatever 
rank we give this power among powers, that rank, 
in a supreme degree, falls to Shakespeare. He 
was able from within to raise up, and therefore 
easily to work in word and action, the most di- 
verse and varied characters ; these were the abun- 
dant, living, lively offspring of his fecund imagi- 
nation. They traversed the stage, and occupied it 
unendingly with humorous and tragic incidents, be- 
cause these passions were in them, and they were 
to the manner born. This supreme command of 
human nature, this ability to make it shift its form 
and color every instant, as a cloud that fades or 
glows in sunlight, also enabled him to treat with 
equal felicity those allied, unlike forms that hover 
on the bounds of the rational, yet range beyond 
them, the spirit, the witch, the monster, the idiot, 
the half-dazed, or one altogether insane. As cari- 
cature, if successful, must grow out of that which 
is real, must be a distortion aptly put upon it, so 
the supernatural and the unnatural will only obey 
those who are masters of nature. 

This creative power is not imagination, though 
it wakes imagination to its highest efforts; nor 
judgment, though judgment constantly moderates 
and consolidates its work; nor sympathy, though 



SHAKESPEARE. 121 

sympathy, in the putting forth of this strength, gives 
life to it and receives it from it each instant ; nor 
memory, though memory draws -for it upon the 
crowded recollections of active and eventful years ; 
nor yet perception, the combined intuition of the 
senses and the reason, though this lies nearer the 
nucleus than any other one act ; it is all these, in- 
terfusing and feeding each other, till the mind be- 
comes a fruitful field, in which a fertile soil waits 
on refreshing showers, and these on the seeds of 
tender plants, sturdy shrubs, and towering trees. 
Such a prolific soul was Shakespeare's, and his cre- 
ations came up in like abundance, and grew with the 
same overshadowing strength and luxuriant ease of 
life. His relation to art, it is not, therefore, difficult 
to define, He reached it by the inevitable force of 
his faculties. To bind the genius of one nation, 
when it attains such vigor as did that of the English 
people in Shakespeare, to the rules of art applicable 
to another time and climate, is to miss utterly the 
freedom which belongs to every creative impulse. 
As the flora of one region, or the beauty of one 
sky, is not that of another, so the literature of each 
period stands by the force of the life that is in it. 
Influence, instruction may lead to high art, but not 
imitation. To insist on any absolute excellence in 
Grecian architecture, or sculpture, or poetry, not to 
be departed from, is to make over all subsequent 
time to mediocrity. It is the office of genius, not 
to fulfil another's law, but to disclose the law of its 
own nature, and of its own age. This Shakespeare 
did, he emphasized and completed the bold, free, 
6 



122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

rugged drama for which English life and history 
had prepared the way. He thus accomplished the 
work centuries had been laying out for him. This 
energetic English temper or form he carries with 
him, no matter where he casts the scenes of his 
drama ; and while it is one which grew up histori- 
cally from his age and nation, and was brought to 
its sovereign proportions by the strength of his 
single nature, it is all the more that of true' art, 
because of these native, living, consistent forces 
which were unfolded in it. Taine says of Shake- 
speare, that his master faculty is " an imagination 
freed from the fetters of reason and morality." 
Trained in a more quiet and obedient school, one 
less passionate and less inspired, he regards the 
English stage as presenting a dramatic literature 
of " raving exaggerations," whose "ideas all verge 
on the absurd ; " but the catholic critic will recog- 
nize in this language the judgment of one suddenly 
falling upon an art too new and strong for him, and 
mistaking, therefore, its very vigor and life for law- 
lessness. He has passed from the garden to the 
forest, and the trees seem to him awkward and dis- 
proportioned through excessive, growth, through the 
impress of the struggles by which they have at 
length overtopped their fellows, and occupied with 
sturdy branches the upper air. A little time, more 
familiarity, might lead him to discover a majesty 
and freedom here, quite beyond the tempered and 
proportionate life that he has left. 

Undoubtedly Shakespeare accepts the English 
method and impulse, with its restrictions upon it, 



SHAKESPEARE. 1 23 

with its peculiarities, its own possibilities within it; 
but these, when pushed to their limits by his 
strength, are quite sufficient for a great and com- 
plete art. This narrowness, on the one side, and 
vigor, on the other, may be seen in the women of 
Shakespeare. His ideal is the English ideal. His 
best creations, those in which he gathers up the 
beauties of his art, are full of love, patience, de- 
pendence; quick in insight, yet without mastery; 
incomplete in themselves, and waiting to attach 
themselves to some centre of manly force and life, 
from which, as flowers whose roots are hidden in 
the crevice of a rock, they may rise and blossom in 
fragile beauty. He knows also the termagant, that 
worse than masculine nature, which, breaking its 
close confinement, does itself every species of vio- 
lence under the wayward impulse that rules it, 
driven far beyond its own will by the severity of a 
censure it cannot soften ; but he knows little of 
woman as a self-contained and independent power, 
as ruling within herself, measurably complete in 
her own nature, and thus able to rule and thrive 
with others. 

Falstaff, his chief humorous creation, is also 
very English in character, and quite opportune to 
the English drama. His humor is in his flesh, his 
blood, his action, quite as much as on his tongue. 
He is full of vitiosity, without being hateful; his 
very grossness saves him from our anger, and we 
feel that he plots no mischief, save as he is driven 
to it by a coarse, unconquerable, appetitive nature. 
Our moral sense is apologetic toward him, as is our 



124 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

sesthetical sentiment to an interesting, though un- 
couth, specimen of animal life. We feel that he is 
as yef scarcely bred above his physical impulses, 
and that only in the line of cunning and vanity ; a 
fact so palpable as to make praise and blame mis- 
directed, when applied to his actions. In short, he 
finds entrance and countenance in a furtive way, 
through a momentary remissness of an overtired 
moral sense, without essentially vitiating its gen- 
eral judgments, or abating its force. He is no 
Italian villain, whom we must know, and knowing 
hate. 

Taine speaks of Shakespeare as a " Nature 
poetical, immoral, inspired," also as " void of will 
and reason." These adjectives we think can not be 
so grouped, and each retain its full force. To be 
immoral is to lack in part, in one direction at least, 
poetical inspiration ; for the noblest creations of 
character would be thereby shut out from the vision 
of the soul. What, then, is Shakespeare's relation 
to morality ? He is not certainly a religionist ; he 
is not a moralist. He neither fashions precepts, 
nor makes it his business directly or indirectly to 
enforce them. Is he therefore immoral ? Then is 
nature immoral, human history and the record of 
daily life ; for it is these that Shakespeare repro- 
duces. If he does not so construct his plot, so 
manipulate his characters, as to give peculiar and 
brilliant light to moral issues, no more does he pervert 
and cover them up. He allows the moral forces, 
among other real natural forces, to flow on with 
events, to exercise their own share of control over 



SHAKESPEARE. 125 

them, and to come out, from time to time, in terrific 
thunder shocks of retribution. He merely fails, as 
a showman, to arrest the spectacle, invite attention 
and rehearse the unmistakable lesson. At bottom, 
Shakespeare, instead of being an immoral, is a 
moral writer ; because he handles powerfully and 
truthfully natural, real forces ; those which in the 
world shape character, control its development, 
gather up its issues. In this region to be true, to be 
complete, is in the most important of all ways to be 
moral ; and to be untrue and incomplete, though a 
thousand tags of morality be tacked to the story, 
or woven into it as its deceitful labels, is to be im- 
moral. It is with the interior combination of opin- 
ions, sentiments, choices, that the artist has to do, 
— and the true moralist as welt — with the natural 
issue of events, and the ripe fruits of character ; and 
these all proceed under the laws, and disclose the 
facts of the world, as God ordains them. The 
drama, the novel, the history, the biography, so pre- 
senting them, is moral ; has in it the precise moral- 
ity which governs and illuminates the world. His- 
tory is not printed in raised letters for the morally 
blind to read ; it is not a Sabbath-school book for 
children, devising for each sin an instant disaster ; 
yet it is, with all its crimes, its atrocities, its ninety- 
nine unrighteous acts, and its one hundredth virtu- 
ous one, so far moral as to be God's great and inex- 
haustible revelation of morality ; that wherein he 
discloses character, uncovers good and evil, and 
leads ultimately to the light the excellent, the 
admirable, all that men do in their secret soul's 



126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

honor. The religionist and the sensualist may make 
the same mistake, that of calculating the orbit of ac- 
tion from too small an arc. See deeply, see broadly, 
follow conduct with the patience of Providence, and 
there is no room for two opinions. The higher the 
art, therefore, the more certainly it reaches nature 
in its balance of motives, and in the issues of action, 
the more certainly is it moral. This morality belongs 
to Shakespeare. When crime, as in Macbeth ; or 
guilt, as in the King of Denmark ; or villainy, as in 
lago ; or avarice, as in Shylock, come before us, 
they do so in their own character, and we have no 
other thing to say of them, than when, in the trag- 
edy of history under the ordering of a higher hand, 
they move across the real stage of life. Shake- 
speare, also, by his high artistic power, was lifted 
into a purer region than that which belonged 
to his cotemporaries ; felt less the need of low in- 
uendo, and vulgar ribaldry ; could win and command 
attention by the vigor of his primary movement, and 
thus ordinarily holds on his way without soil from 
the defilement about him. That which is low, he 
touches lightly, and never makes his feast of it. He 
is full of resources, and these render him select and 
confident in his ground. As nature is knit to 
morality, and in fellowship with its purity, so is and 
must be its every great master. It is the petty 
limitations, the sad restrictions men have put on 
morality, its shallowness and barrenness, a clear- 
ness gained by the loss of all depth and power, that 
have led them to think of Shakespeare as immoral, 
and of the world as immoral ; and that too, per- 



SHAKESPEARE. \2J 

chance, while allowing God, in their conception of 
him, to absorb by foreordination all the sins of men 
into his own constitution. What we most need 
are eyes to see what God is about, and in this 
every great artist helps us. 

The works of God are broader than our broadest 
works, fuller of sympathies, richer in beauties, more 
fruitful in affections. It is the part of inspiration to 
see some new portion of this wealth, and of teach- 
ableness to be taught it. 

Shakespeare is moral, then, by the full torrent 
and truthfulness of his overmastering genius, and 
immoral by the ooze and drainage of adjacent 
times. Shakespeare is surprisingly impersonal. 
He has written much, yet we know very little of 
him — William Shakespeare. He is back of his 
characters creatively, not sympathetically. He 
yields them one and all, without haste, without 
delay, to the lav/s of the world into which he has 
brought them. This one fact gives him a serene 
moral elevation. It is also surprising that Shake- 
speare should have been so apparently indifferent to 
posthumous fame. In the years that intervened 
between his retirement and his death, he seems to 
have done nothing for the editing or publishing of 
his plays ; but to have left them to their chances, an 
abandoned literary progeny. There is in this a won- 
derful alienation from ordinary human feeling. • 



LECTURE VI. 

Milton, his youth, manhood, old age. — Criticism on his Works. 

A Transition Period. — Revolutionary Times Critical. — (a) Antagon- 
ism of political Parties. — The Literature of each. — Hudibras. — 
The Drama. — Its Degeneracy, reasons of, — (i) Pecuniary Inter- 
ests, — (2) Moral Influences, — (3) Scenic Effects, — (4) Unfitness 
of Deep Emotions for a Spectacle. — (b), Antagonism between 
French and English Tendencies ; (<r), between Criticism and Cre- 
ation. — Dryden, position, character, powers. 

The third great name of the Elizabethan age is 
that of Milton. As Spenser's stands at its com- 
mencement, opening its portals backward on the 
past, where the glow of the fading day of chivalry 
still rests on the horizon ; so does Milton step forth 
at its close, as one who has caught the prophetic 
force of its spirit, and sees the light of new ideas, 
of dawning ages, deeply penetrating the spaces be- 
fore him and about him. Spenser is animated by a 
gentle, erudite and meditative spirit, a piety and 
poetry that soften and veil the harsh, unholy facts 
of life ; that rearrange and represent them with a 
mellow light that quite conceals the conflicts of 
good and evil, and brings to the world as it is, and 
yet more to it as- it has been, a cheerful and benign 
aspect. He is the poet of conventional forms, and 
a conventional religion. Shakespeare moves amid 
the sturdy, strong passions that play into and under 
social events, whether they be right or wrong. 
He is the poet of natural, constitutional forces, 

(128) 



MILTON. 129 

and thus of natural religion and morality. He 
deals with the fearful shocks of the moral world ; 
because the intellectual atmosphere of the human 
soul is penetrated and convulsed by them. There 
can be no terrific storms without these thunder- 
claps of justice, this sharp lightning of conscience; 
and Shakespeare is the poet of natural religion, be- 
cause he cannot otherwise present nature. Milton 
is the poet of definite and progressive dogma, a re- 
vealed religion that lives to conquer, that casts off 
the past, and bestirs itself in perpetual resistance 
and struggle to win a new future. The religious 
sentiment had divided itself. A portion lingered ; 
another portion pushed onward, accepted the civil 
and reformatory conflicts of the hour, and gave 
itself unreservedly to a social and religious ideal. 
This spirit the soul of Milton gathered with full 
force into itself. His life was spent beyond the 
calm of the strictly Elizabethan age. He ripened 
under the conflict of its dissevered elements, adopt- 
ed its progressive forces, and opened the way be- 
fore them. In a reactionary hour, that brought 
quiet and neglect to his old age, he gave, in poetry, 
a rehearsal, in their grandest phase, to the same 
ideas that had ruled his actions. 

Milton was the poet of revealed religion under 
its Puritanic type. The style and thought of Mil- 
ton, are native to this earnest and extended insight 
of his mind. From the beginning he manifested 
the same scope and majesty. He always spread a 
broad wing, and floated serenely ; moving at eas 2 
from peak to peak. His literary life dropped into 
6* 



130 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

three periods, youth, manhood, and old age ; and 
each, under one general impulse, fell to different 
and fitting tasks. The Hymn on the Nativity right- 
ly opened his literary labors. There were gathered 
with this into his early life secondary poems, brief 
morning flights of the imagination, which serve to 
disclose the nature of the powers he held in reserve 
for the real labors of the day. These first hours of 
song were displaced by a long, sultry midday, in 
which Milton, forgetful of poetry, gave himself to the 
vigorous championship of ideas — ideas the most sig- 
nificant the world then held, the most formidable in 
action, the most pregnant in theoretical and practical 
results, ideas that plucked at thrones and laid the 
foundations of commonwealths. Without regret, 
driven by the earnestness of his own nature, Milton 
turned to the conflict of argument, and called up his 
imagination only that it might arm and furnish forth 
the truth ; and send it as a thundering train of 
artillery to speedy conquest. The storm having 
passed by, a sombre, reactionary evening having 
set in, the heavens still cloaked with clouds, the 
blind warrior, finding nothing more to be done, in 
this hush of the senses turned again to poetry, and 
in the ripeness of a ripe mind took up his great 
labor. 

An epic poem on King Arthur had been among 
the early dreams of Milton. From this the stern 
midday duties of his life had diverted him, not only 
diverted him, but fitted him for quite another 
theme. Long tossed in the most 'protracted, pro- 
gressive and critical conflict of the century, he 



MILTON. 131 

naturally found himself, at its close, nerved for 
the narration of a more real and pungent strife 
than that of the thrice told tales of chivalry. His 
eye was directed to the earliest, highest, most ger- 
minant struggle of spirits, rebellious to the moral 
law ; one that opened the wide chasm that di- 
vides hell from heaven, and sowed broadcast on 
earth the seeds of sedition. Here the full ten- 
sion of his thoughts, his deep toned sentiments, 
found sufficient and sympathetic play. There , is 
still preserved in the library of Trinity College, 
Cambridge, a dramatic sketch by Milton, on the 
same theme as Paradise Lost, the fall of angels 
and of men. This was not completed, or at least 
published. It seems probable that the subject 
may have opened unexpected vistas, and been 
recommitted in his mind for this later and larger 
presentation. 

The style of Milton, not less than his depth 
of conviction and stirring experience, fitted him 
for the labor he undertook. So thoroughly pos- 
sessed was he by classical scholarship, so crowded 
was his imagination with antique imagery, that 
nothing but the most overruling and dominant 
impulse could give to him originality, could set 
afloat and convoy these borrowed treasures of traf- 
fic. Under an independent and superior thought, 
they gave scope and grandeur to the movement, 
and richly furnished it out with scenic effect. 

The subject of Paradise 'Lost is such as to 
render impossible a treatment satisfactory to all 
minds. Many -would deny it any treatment, as in 



132 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

some of its branches an unapproachable theme, 
one to be left in the high, unsearchable places of 
thought. This, in absolute, philosophical criticism, 
would seem to be the true view. There is of ne- 
cessity a jar and collision, when the infinite and 
transcendant are made to enter finite limits, and 
that too under the unfamiliar forms of another's 
imagination. Yet when we remember that this is 
done in the person of Christ ; when we recall the 
comparatively rude way in which, without reproach, 
it had been accomplished in painting, a much 
more sensual art than poetry, we believe that 
this first criticism should be waved, and the poet 
held only to the strongest, purest, most simple 
pitch of the imagination, as he makes for us a 
visible way through the invisible things of God. 

This grandeur is conceded to Milton in ap- 
proaching these dread unattainable precincts, this 
Shekinah of our religious thoughts. Do we not 
find, however, both in his presentation of the Deity 
and of Adam, some of the blemishes of a temper 
too positive and dogmatic ? Art is not only not 
didactic, it will not allow the didactic spirit to 
disguise itself under its work. The Deity of the 
highest ethical art must not utter and enforce 
theology ; nor should Adam, in the ruddy fulness, 
the sensual cast of our earliest physical life, im- 
press upon Eve the principles of a school of phi- 
losophy. The criticism made upon Milton that 
seems to us best to hold against him is, that he was 
not always able perfectly to divorce himself from 
his dialectics, and, as the pure creative artist, to 






MILTON. 133 

hold his conceptions, those of God and of Adam, 
aloof from every bias ; the one in the grandeur 
of his impartial, self-poised nature, the other in 
the simplicity and typical freedom of his unper- 
verted and unwrought character. A positive tem- 
perament, advocacy, controversial aims, are un- 
favorable to art, as they warp and limit the ma- 
terial, and distort it to a special purpose. There 
is no fullness, no repose in them, and hence these 
fail to be found in their creations. The intensity of 
the Puritan spirit, so far as it lifted Milton high 
up in religious sentiment, was favorable, most 
favorable, to his poetical inspiration ; so far as it 
bound him under pains and penalties to a limited 
and precise formula, it narrowed his imagination, 
and gave close-at-hand and harsh limits to its 
creations. 

Milton is also criticised for imparting to Satan 
heroic elements ; we think unjustly. Satan is not 
to Milton personified sin, he is a real, historic char- 
acter; and neither philosophy, nor religion, and 
still less poetry, requires that such an one, on the 
instant, through his whole constitution, should be 
turned to weakness and corruption by the touch of 
evil. There are no such utter overthrows, such 
violent and complete transitions, in the spiritual 
world. Sin is an insidious mischief, that does a 
slow, unwholesome, subtile work. It should find 
access to an archangel under the disguise of a 
noble, independent, courageous impulse, and, once 
seated in the heart, turn it steadily to adamantine 
pride and hardness, with such phosphorescent flashes 



134 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

of dying virtue as the decayed, irritable mood of a 
great soul may suffer. Religious art too often mis- 
takes sin, fails of its true paternity, and true descent, 
by not tracing the slow, sure way in which it un- 
knots the virtuous nature, loosens the passions, 
and, abolishing one divine law after another, turns 
all things into misrule, anarchy and night ; the bit- 
ter and exasperate brood of appetite and lust. If 
we discern this fearful and steady descent of sin, it 
is far more dreadful than one mad plunge, which 
annihilates distance, and puts instantly the damned 
one beyond the range of vision and sympathy. Even 
physical spaces must be traversed, and so defined 
for the mind. 

" Nine days they fell ; confounded chaos roar'd, 
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall 
Through his wild anarchy." 

This epic of Milton has helped to close the 
door on the epic of mere war and violence, and to 
affect a transfer of the truly heroic into more purely 
moral realms. Henceforward we wait on the bat- 
tles of spirits, and the struggle of invisible and 
spiritual powers. 

We have placed Milton in the Elizabethan age, 
not because he belongs there in a mere time 
division, but because of his affinity with the great 
inventive spirits that composed it. As a root 
sends up, at a distance from the parent stock, a 
rival tree, so did this first creative force, binding 
back Milton in close sympathy to Spenser, after its 
own proper era had passed by, yield one more of its 
most vigorous products, planted in the middle of 



A TRANSITION PERIOD. 1 35 

the following period. Eras lie interlaced, new 
forces rising in the heart of an old age, old forces 
lost to the eye in the heart of a new age. 

We now turn to a transition period, the last half 
of the seventeenth century, lying between one of 
criticism and one of creation. It is a period of vio- 
lent contrasts. Society was broken up by extreme 
tendencies, and literature was divided and shaped 
by the spirit of the party to which, in its several 
forms, it was attached. The liberty of thought be- 
gotten by the reformation in England had been 
genuine and general. The nation, though aroused 
and strengthened by it, had, in the reign of Eliza- 
beth, been held together. Under her successors 
religious and political liberty became closely united, 
and rapid, earnest minds began to draw off into 
distinct parties. The most progressive tendency, 
primarily religious, secondarily political, was that 
of the Puritans. Against them the royalists, the 
supporters of the established church and govern- 
ment, were arrayed. As in all revolutionary times, 
moderate and intermediate opinions became power- 
less, and an open conflict, ripening into civil war, 
swept away minor differences, consolidating the two 
extreme parties that held the field. Reform is 
rarely universal. It involves, therefore, separation, 
the parting of elements, which have been compara- 
tively homogeneous, mutually restraining each other 
from extreme tendencies. No sooner, however, do 
the portions of society begin to divide, to stand in 
direct repulsion, than, electric equilibrium being 
overthrown, we have two defined and intense poles 



I36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

of counteraction. Opposite tendencies, which be- 
fore checked, now irritate and enhance, each other ; 
and cause the attitude of both parties to become 
more extreme than it would be, if each were left to 
its own free bent. The sweeping away of interven- 
ing persons and parties, the steady concentration 
of hostile camps, the looking upon every act and 
measure first of all in its belligerent character, the 
blinding and distorting effect of mutual hatred, all 
serve to give a violent wrench and warp to the minds 
of either division, and force upon them an extreme, 
and often irrational, attitude, begotten of collision, 
and quite opposed to sober, constructive, propor- 
tionate thought. 

It is this which makes reformatory periods so 
critical. A dividing line appears, and men are 
driven to the one side or the other, often sadly 
against the minor tendencies of their constitution. 
Those who are reluctant to cast up accounts, to 
strike a balance, or to settle, by leading considera- 
tions, their method of action, find themselves tossed 
about by a conflict they cannot still, and at length 
compelled to shelter themselves under opinions 
they would never willingly have accepted. The 
reign of Elizabeth had been one of coalescence, and 
thus of mutual restraint; those of James and of 
Charles were marked, first by separation, then by 
intense strife. 

The Puritan character was not the product of 
peace, but of war ; it had grown up beaten on and 
bowed by severe winds. It showed in every limb 
and twig the twist of the strong currents in which it 



PURITAN CHARACTER. 1 37 

had stood, and with which it had battled. We may 
laugh at the rigor of its precepts, its social austerity, 
its stubborn creed, but these had been made a ne- 
cessity to it by the nature of the conflict on which it 
had entered. If religious laxity and social license 
are to be withstood, they will immediately drive the 
reformatory party into vigorous, pitiless, unsympa- 
thetic attack. Only thus can they separate them- 
selves, and become belligerent. Total abstinence 
is the offspring of general intoxication. Thus the 
two parties in England forced each other to the last 
results of their respective tendencies. The warfare 
was not one merely of principles, but of principles 
wrought into social life, compacted and extravagant- 
ly developed in tastes, manners and literature. 

The Puritan, scrupulous, unbending, severely in 
earnest, was railed at as a fanatic, bigot and hypo- 
crite. The royalist, irreligious and reckless, cling- 
ing to the easy and comfortable shelter of old forms 
in government and faith, easily fell into levity and 
lewdness, and seemed tohis adversary little better 
than a papist or an infidel. On the one hand re- 
buke, on the other ridicule, increased their mutual 
aversion. The courtier felt that he defied the Pu- 
ritan in defying decency; and the Puritan rejected 
the follies of the world the more warmly for being 
the follies of the royalist. When we can hate our 
own and God's enemies at the same time, we are 
wont to hate with a will. 

To carry this movement to its extreme limit, 
nothing was needed but a transfer of power back- 
wards and forwards from party to party, that each 



I38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

in turn might suffer the tyranny of the other. This 
took place in the overthrow which the troops of 
Cromwell brought to the throne. The contempt of 
the royalist for the Puritan was then lost in hatred. 
When, therefore, at the restoration, embittered 
not instructed by misfortune, he once more gained 
control, took possession of society, opened the the- 
atres, and assumed the guidance of literature, it 
is not strange that there was such an outbreak 
of immorality and misrule as England had not be- 
fore witnessed. The evil was so excessive as to 
cure itself. A reaction set in, resulting in the rev- 
olution of eighty-eight. The harshness of the an- 
tagonism was once more softened down, and "the 
elements were again so far blended as to make so- 
ciety possible and bearable. Thus way was made 
for a new era in society and literature. 

In this rocking, revolutionary age, by which the 
nation was carried forward from Elizabeth to 
William and Anne, from Shakespeare to Pope and 
Addison, we have only conflicting and transition 
tendencies, conflict itself involving a transfer and 
readjustment of forces, the overthrow of an old 
equilibrium and the construction of a new one. 

The first of these conflicts is that of the relig- 
ious, political and social parties now glanced at, 
each a passionate and partial development, though 
the one was generally just and right in its ten- 
dency, and the other as generally wayward and 
wrong. Art, seeking balance, proportion, beauty 
in its products, suffered on either side, yet not 
equally. In the sound, earnest, progressive spirit 



PURITAN CHARACTER. 1 39 

of the Puritans, there were hidden germs of 
growth ; in the worn out, effete, corrupt spirit of the 
cavalier, there could finally be found nothing but 
death, though the glow and flush of a free, reckless 
life still lingered. The Hudibras of Butler pre- 
sents, perhaps, the best literary embodiment of this 
party. Full of wit, indicating large resources of 
knowledge, it is sensual, disconnected and radically 
false to the characters it satirizes. We are sur- 
prised at the wasted ability and blind bitterness it 
evinces. That satire of this extreme and disjointed 
character should be the best literary effort of the 
royalists, while the Puritans were nourishing the 
genius of Milton, and from their lowest ranks, by 
the strength of the spirit that ruled them, bringing 
forth the rare talents of Bunyan, shows with whom 
alone a genuine and productive purpose was found. 
Dislike may beget malignant satire, culture may 
call forth wit, levity may make sprightly a licen- 
tious stage, and the gayety of polite society may 
concentrate these products into a period of ephem- 
eral brilliancy, but nothing noble and sincere will 
thus be created, passing on for the admiration of 
subsequent generations. In lyrical poetry two con- 
flicting sentiments, the devotional and the amatory, 
held the field. As in Herbert and Lovelace, strong 
contrasts were everywhere present. 

The literature of a theological and practical 
character fell largely to the Puritans. This, 
through its didactic ends and transient uses, neces- 
sarily held an insignificant' place in letters. The 
drama, early attacked by the Puritans, passed into 



140 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

the hands of the royalists. Suppressed during the 
Commonwealth and Protectorate, it was revived at 
the Restoration, under the most immediate influ- 
ence of the court party. The consequence was that 
the drama, while marked with some high intellect- 
ual qualities, more especially those of wit and in- 
sight, now became more corrupt than ever before, 
had in it less constructive power, and disconnected 
itself from this time onward almost wholly from 
literature. 

Passing this period, only here and there do we 
find one eminent in literary art, as Goldsmith and 
Sheridan, whose reputation is at all associated with 
the theatre. The later writers of the drama, as 
Shelley, Byron, Browning, look for an audience and 
a criticism entirely disconnected from the stage ; 
their plays are of a purely literary character ; while 
those whose productions have been primarily com- 
posed for the theatre are, most of them, scarcely 
known in the literary world. Thus play-writing has 
either sunk to a practical, money-making art ; or, 
reserving itself for literature, has forgotten the ex- 
ternal, immediate ends that in the outset gave rise 
to it. This separation followed close upon the 
drama of the Restoration, most of whose products, 
rank with profligacy, have fallen into that decay 
which now so speedily overtakes this class of 
composition. 

The abasement of this period was found, not 
merely in outspoken licentiousness and vile -inu- 
endo, but in the entire construction of the play. 
Sexual intrigue was made a chief line of adventure, 



THE THEATRE. I4I 

a crusade against female virtue the passion of every 
spirited courtier, his traditionary field of arms ; 
while husbands, fathers, brothers were the Saracens 
and Turks who unlawfully held the holy land. No 
deeper corruption of human thought and activity 
is to be conceived of, and the occasional virtue 
of some rare character, made to turn on sexual 
purity, served only to show, in the extravagant sen- 
timent that was gathered about it, that men sinned 
wittingly, and caught single glimpses, though very 
false and partial ones, of the heaven from which 
they had been cast out. When the most ordinary 
possession of a pure mind is exalted into a rhapsody 
of virtue, we see at once how fearfully men have 
fallen off from the familiar laws of morality. The 
corruption of the many, men and women, no more 
betrays the fatal secret of the low, appetitive life 
all were leading, than the sentimental enshrine- 
ment of here and there a heroine, whose mantle of 
honor is after all little more than the ordinary pu- 
rity of her sex. This debasement in the substance 
of thought and sentiment easily united itself to a 
like decay in form. Thus the dignity of blank 
verse often gave way to the more external, sensual 
effect of rhyme ; or the comedy, stooping altogether 
to the portrayal of indecency and vice, lost fellow- 
ship with fine art, became prose, and satisfied the 
coarse minds it fed with the mere garbage of vul- 
garity, flung out in the quickest, easiest fashion. 

The degeneracy of the practical drama thus 
commenced has remained with us, in a greater or 
less degree, for various reasons. A theatre is a 



142 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

money-making institution, and must, therefore, 
strive to interest as many as possible. Its appeals 
must be to the masses seeking amusement. Hence 
it is confined to large cities. In these cities its 
efforts must be directed to those in search of pleas- 
ure, and therefore to those quite partially, rather than 
to those highly cultivated ; to those desiring coarse 
stimulus, rather than to those in love with refined 
sentiment. Such is the spirit of a theatrical audi- 
ence, not merely from their native quality, but from 
the time devoted to this amusement, and the part 
it plays of hilarity and excitement in their daily 
lives. The theatre is thus compelled to bow to a 
money necessity, a relatively menial service, and so 
to miss, in whole or in part, its own aesthetical end. 
This falling off from purity has all along been 
felt, was felt during the restoration^ had been pre- 
viously felt. In the period under consideration it 
called for censure, provoked hostility on the part of 
earnest minds, and thus early created a moral sen- 
timent, which, to the present hour, pressing hard 
upon the theatre, has accelerated its downward 
tendencies. If the most intelligent and moral re- 
fuse to be pleased, and withhold their patronage, 
much more must the classes less critical in these 
respects be gratified. The patrons must control 
the play. Thus the theatre, as a rule, in recent 
times, has been forced below the level of high art, 
first, by the interested monetary motives that govern 
it ; and, second, by an adverse moral sentiment, 
passing it over still more unreservedly to sensuous 
pastime and pleasure, to comedy and farce. This 



THE THEATRE. 1 43 

degeneracy of the theatre has been partial and va- 
riable, rather than complete, relative rather than 
absolute. There have been places and spasms of 
improvement, and the general moral elevation of 
society has told powerfully here as elsewhere. 

This downward literary tendency the theatre 
has also accepted and confirmed by its manage- 
ment. Its expenditures on scenic effects have been 
of the most lavish character. Herein the modern 
stands in striking contrast with the early stage. 

The rush-strewn boards that Shakespeare trod 
almost under the open sky, lounged on by a ban- 
tering nobility, pressed close by a rude, noisy 
crowd, had little in common with the luxury, the 
gaslight, the brilliant, sensuous appeals of the 
modern theatre ; and we may easily believe, that 
the hold on reality in action was in the same 
stern spirit, as were these coarse, homely relations 
to facts. 

Every possibility has been exhausted to amuse 
and delight men through their senses, thus trans- 
ferring the chief effect from the intellectual to the 
physical world. A newspaper critic gives the fol- 
lowing description of one of these modern plays : 
" It includes a burning house, a modern bar- 
room, real gin cock-tails, a river-side pier, a steam- 
boat in motion, the grand saloon or state-cabin 
of the steamboat, the deck of the same, the wheel- 
house, the funnels, and the steamboat in flames; 
and all these objects are presented with singular 
fidelity to their originals." Here is a show in it- 
self quite sufficient to captivate the popular mind. 



144 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Sentiment and character would be a gratuitous ad- 
dition. It prepares us to hear a like critic say 
of a similar play, ''It is not a work of literature, 
but a work of business. The piece is a rough 
conglomeration of the nothings of the passing 
hour — objects and incidents drawn, but not al- 
ways drawn with accuracy, from the streets, the 
public conveyances, the haunts of profligacy. 
These nothings are offered for their own sake, 
and not made tributary to any intellectual pur- 
pose whatever." It may be doubted whether 
readings do not now furnish a more pure intel- 
lectual rendering of dramatic composition than 
does the stage. 

Another cause which depresses the theatre, 
without affecting the drama as a written product, 
is the unfitness of high ethical sentiment, magnan- 
imity, faith, love to constitute a public spectacle 
for a mixed, careless, critical audience of cold, su- 
perficial amateurs, such as are wont to frequent 
our theatres. Fine scenery, violent declamation, 
showy beauty, and rich attire invite a battery of 
opera-glasses ; not so the deep, secret emotions 
with which the heart wrestles, nor its holiest af- 
fections, nor its purest adorations ; these all draw 
back till they can disclose themselves, like the 
opening flower, in a light that quickens and re- 
news them. How the idle claps, following hard 
on a scene of pathos, tumble down the airy fabric 
of our sympathies, like a card house, and choke 
us again with the dust of a noisy, conventional 
life. 



FRENCH AND ENGLISH ART. 145 

The literary drama and the theatre parted 
company, because the limited and sensuous aims 
of the one were not consistent with the high bent 
of the other ; and the separation dates from this 
deep decline of the English stage. 

A second conflict which reveals the agencies 
at work in this transition period was that be- 
tween French and English art. The French lit- 
erature was now ready to exert a strong influ- 
ence on the English mind. Easily uniting itself 
to the classical taste, with which it is so closely 
affiliated, it constituted the chief foreign power 
which affected this period. The English court 
was in close sympathy with France. There it had 
spent the years of its banishment, and returned, 
emulous of the tastes and refinements of its al- 
lies. The brilliant reign of Louis XIV. was in 
progress, the great epoch of French letters. 
Dryden, the earliest critic of England, favored 
in many respects the new refinements, as they 
were thought, of art. Many words, chiefly of a 
polite, social cast, found their way into our 
language. Rhymed verse was introduced into 
the drama, and it, in keeping with this change, 
strove to assume in dialogue the sprightly refine- 
ment, wit and declamatory force of the French 
stage. These tendencies were in conflict with the 
freedom and vigor of the previous age, with its 
thorough English spirit. Thus Dryden, with eyes 
couched by the new criticism, was led to say, 
" Let any man who understands English read 
diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, 
7 



I46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

and I dare undertake, that he will find in every 
page either some solecism of speech, or some 
notorious flaw in sense." 

This new art, and this freedom and refinement 
of manners, which the English at this time thought 
to win under the lead of the French, resulted in a 
feebleness, coarseness and debauchery, which those 
whom they imitated have been quite ready to laugh 
at. Says Taine of these years, " There were two 
classes, natural beings on the one hand, and artifi- 
cial ones on the other ; the first, with the coarseness 
and shamelessness of their primitive inclinations, the 
second, with the frivolities and vices of worldly 
habits ; the first, uncultivated, their simplicity re- 
vealing nothing but their innate baseness ; the sec- 
ond, cultivated, their refinement instilling into them 
nothing but new corruption."'"" 

English character is so little allied to French 
character, that it is at once made unsound and 
superficial by imitation. The moral force is central 
in the Englishman. It is and must be momentarily 
operative for good or evil in his action. The French- 
man more easily leaves it one side, or out of sight, 
and can reach a free surface life, in a measure for- 
getful of it. Hence sin, social . sin, always bears a 
deeper, more gross and sanguinary tinge with the 
English than with the French. They are com- 
pelled to recognize their own indecency, and it 
thus becomes a double irritation. They strike every 
instant against the moral law, and feel the wound- 
ing recoil. Their eyes are open in each transgres- 

* Taine's English Literature, vol. i. p. 512. 



THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH. 1 47 

sion to their new infamy, and they are proportionately 
intoxicated and maddened by it. The French, as 
skaters upon the ice, glide gracefully along on a 
surface sentiment, an aesthetical tendency, and 
rarely pierce the film to the waters beneath, which 
support it, seldom penetrate the depths of their own 
moral being ; the English sail on an open sea, they 
are restrained by a heavier, less manageable ele- 
ment, they bear more with them, and tack and turn, 
not in mere sportiveness, but in the pursuit of some 
proportionate good, while collision is irretrievable 
shipwreck. They cannot reach the gayety and in- 
difference of the Frenchman, and for them to affect 
it, is to betray themselves at once into folly and 
corruption. No man is so cold and shameless as 
an Englishman, a Lord Chesterfield, built upon a 
French model. He is to the native born French- 
man what a skating rink is to the mountain lake : 
first there is a thin layer of ice, and. then a thick 
layer of mud, with no interior flow, no depth, no 
beauty between them. A Frenchman or an Italian 
when they drive, crack the whip over the heads and 
about the ears of their horses, as if urging them on 
with a fusilade of- musketry. The animals soon 
learn that this is only the froth and hilarity of mo- 
tion, and maintain a quiet trot. An English horse 
would be maddened beyond control by such stimu- 
lus, and dash off in a break neck race. His nerves 
are too many, and too much alive, to endure this 
extravagance of stimulus. Like his master, he 
must have a sober rule, or run away altogether. 
The third conflict of the period was allied to 



I48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

this one of nationalities, it was that between crea- 
tion and criticism. We have termed the era a transi- 
tion one. It lay between the two most distinct, 
pronounced and vigorous stages in English literary- 
life. Bold, independent movement, powerful inven- 
tion, belonged to the previous age. Its teachers of 
art were few, of the cast of Jonson, who, with an au- 
thoritative temper, enclosed art very much within 
his own personal bias, was neither very attentive to 
it himself beyond his predilections, nor very suc- 
cessful in enforcing it upon others. The most mas- 
tered art only by that mastery of their own re- 
sources which belongs to power. In the period we 
are now considering, invention, having gathered the 
first harvest, was gleaning autumnal fields. It felt 
also the force of that new, colder, more critical 
phase of thought, which was approaching. Litera- 
ture had expended its projectile power, and was be- 
ing swept in by a rhetoric, esoteric tendency which 
had sprung up in the cultivated mind, ready to con- 
trol every free, aberrant thought. Times of transi- 
tion are often inferior alike to those which precede 
them and those which follow them. They offer no 
perfect, no single and sufficient impulse, but are 
distracted and distorted by conflicting forces. Dry- 
den is full of criticism, yet presents no sustained and 
consistent practice under it. He has moments of 
original power, but these are lost in the waste inter- 
vals of imperfect art. Neither tendency being ex- 
clusively trusted to, but both in turn betrayed, each 
fails to justify the writer. There is art enough to 
offer a ready standard to censure, there is native 



TRANSITION. 149 

force enough to make us uneasy and regretful un- 
der the restrictions of a stumbling, hesitating art. 

The transition persons, in whom the new move- 
ment first appeared, are usually given as Waller 
and Denham ; and this, in large part, from the esti- 
mate in which Dryden, Pope and their cotempora- 
ries held these poets. "Well placing of words for 
the sweetness of pronunciation was not known till 
Mr. Waller introduced it," says Dryden. And 
again, "The excellence and dignity of rhyme were 
never fully understood till Waller taught it in lyric ; 
and Denham in epic poesy." Pope terms the latter 
of these, the "Majestic Denham." That poets so 
secondary as these two, whose excellence is at best 
so formal, should have initiated a new tendency, 
goes to show how cold and lifeless was the school 
of poetry ready to come forward. In this conflict 
between criticism and invention, the royalist and 
French influence favored the former. Though these 
themselves were transient forces in English society, 
united with an inherent tendency toward critical 
art, of which we shall speak more fully in connec- 
tion with the next period, they were able to give 
form to a full century to English literature. 

The undisputed chief of this transition time was 
Dryden, a man every way typical of it. He may be 
set down as the first autocrat in the realm of Eng- 
lish letters ; as tne founder of that dynasty in whose 
line of descent are found Pope and Johnson. The 
very fact of such an authority is significant. Lit- 
erary rule in the club and coffee-house falls to the 
critical, rather than to the inventive mind. Crea- 



I50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

tion is coy, lifts a man more or less away from 
his fellows, may diminish, rather than increase, his 
control over them ; and brings with it stimulus, in- 
direct guidance, rather than instant, definite govern- 
ment. Criticism, on the other hand, is at once in- 
telligible, is dictatorial, and arraigns before itself all 
parties. Shakespeare was not in his generation, at 
the Mermaid, such a ruler as Dryden in his; in- 
deed the reins in that earlier period fell rather to 
Jonson, the critic of the Shakesperian circle. The 
seat of Dryden's authority was Will's coffee-house, 
and he owed his influence to the fact, that he united 
the critical function to his creative power ; that he 
enforced art by that theory and. precept which make 
the critic the expounder of his own times, rather 
than by that genius which pushes its possessor in 
advance of his age, conquering for him a kingdom 
in the future. Dryden held easy and sovereign 
sway as one who most skilfully inquired into, court- 
ed and controlled the literary predilections of the 
period. 

His character led him to conciliation and con- 
cession. He was governed by no supreme, ele- 
vated impulse, he was a devotee to no theory, but 
with considerable insight and power of adaptation, 
adjusted his action to the predominant impressions, 
the passing circumstances. He undertook literary 
labor as work, and wrought at it as one apprenticed 
to the business, rather than as one who felt chiefly 
the control of inspiration, who built above and be- 
yond the style about him, by impulses transcending 
it. He bound himself to furnish a certain number 



DRYDEN. I 5 I 

of plays each year, and, like a shrewd contractor, 
tried to fill the order in a manner agreeable to the 
taste of those who gave it. In one play, breaking 
through this tacit contract with his times, he signal- 
izes the fact by the title, " All for Love." He him- 
self says : " I confess my chief endeavors are to 
delight the age in which I live. If the humor of 
this be for low comedy, small accidents, and rail- 
lery, I will force my genius to obey it." 

If his genius, as he flatteringly terms it, had 
been greater, he could never have bowed it to this 
servile work. It would, in sheer wilfulness, in sim- 
ple self-assertion, have refused the servitude. As 
it was, it couched like the strong ass Issacher, be- 
tween two burdens. Seeing that rest was good, 
and the land pleasant, it bowed the shoulder to 
bear. So much was his vision, his intellectual 
vision, above his practical bias, that in the end he 
confesses, " I have been myself too much of a lib- 
ertine in most of my poems, which I should be well 
contented, if I had time, either to purge, or to see 
them fairly burned." 

So far did he allow the badness of the passing 
years to push him from the purposes 'of art, that 
Walter Scott says of him, " His indelicacy was like 
the forced impudence of a bashful man." We are 
led to wish in him either more or less power ; more, 
that he may better command adverse influences ; 
or less, that he may sink under them unregretted. 
The weakness of Dryden was a moral one, a want 
of firmness, coherence and vigor in those ethical 
impulses which direct and keep true the intellectual 



152 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

powers. There was no one central fire in his nature, 
which, with a lifting current, gathered up and ele- 
vated his thoughts, stirred the flame, or bore its 
sparks in one brilliant shower toward heaven. 

This weakness of the faith elements is seen in 
his religious belief. He drifted from Puritanism 
through the Church of England over into Catholi- 
cism, resting at length under a charge of mercen- 
ary tergiversation. There are two classes, who, by 
a bias of nature, are inclined toward the Catholic 
Church. The erudite, on whom antiquity has pro- 
foundly impressed itself, whose piety is of a medi- 
tative, poetic cast ; and who, like fragile and beau- 
tiful blue-bells, care not so much for the depth of 
the soil they thrive in, as to feel the rock, un- 
broken, earth-centred, just beneath them ; and 
those with whom religion is a matter of necessity 
rather than choice, a thing of fears and supersti- 
tions, and who covet the shelter of a church which 
will take all risks upon itself, and guarantee its 
disciples on easy terms. Dryden seems to us to 
belong to the second class. A superstitious feel- 
ing is shown in his casting the nativity of his son ; 
and his restlessness under religious influences, yet 
sensitiveness to them, in his dislike of the clergy. 

" Kings and preests are in a manner bound, 
For reverence sake, to be close hypocrites." 

How did this ethical weakness in Dryden affect 
him in art? He is admitted to have possessed fine 
powers. Passages of striking beauty are found in 
his works ; but they are thinly scattered, and do 
not cluster anywhere in such number or order as 



DRYDEN. 153 

to constitute one great work. His plays are so 
polluted, that we no more covet their wit than the 
garments that smoulder with buried kings. He 
wrote them avowedly under the mean, mercantile 
inspiration of the sentiment, " He who lives to 
please, must please to live." Falling by these 
words of shrewd concession from the heights of the 
moral world, there happened to lie -under him, for 
his reception, nothing but the sensuality of a court 
society, just passing out of life by spontaneous 
decay. Here, at this altar of lust, he ministered, 
and his plays have perished with it. In his ruling 
sentiment, just given, he struck the key-note of 
dissolution in the English drama, of its sad dissolv- 
ing melody. Ceasing to be filled with its own life, 
and anxious only for immediate gains, it has sunk 
from an art to an avocation ; and its composers, 
from artists to playwrights. Only great actors en- 
able it for a brief period to return to the tragedies 
of Shakespeare. 

His poems are largely satirical, didactic, po- 
lemic. The excellencies that lie on this low grade, 
he attained ; conciseness of thought, aptness of ex- 
pression, pomp and majesty of language, an occa- 
sional beautiful image, critical prefaces rivalling in 
interest the poems that follow them, lively versions, 
vigorous translations, and an increasing mastery of 
the formal conditions of verse. Against these at- 
tainments lie the facts, that his works as a whole 
are heavy, tedious ; that they never quite justify his 
talent ; that he seems to feel a better impulse than 
that which he obeys ; to work at little things with 



154 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

passing visions of greater ones ; and in the end is 
content, that his poems, for the most part, should be 
burned, a sentiment in which he and the world may 
well be at one again. Says Voltaire of him " An 
author who would have had a glory without a blem- 
ish, if he had only written the tenth part of his 
works." * 

To us his weakness is that of the circle in which 
he moved. He lacked virile, moral force, which is 
to the poet what it is to the man, the spring, the 
coil of his intellectual mechanism, driving his ideas, 
giving them firm rotation, and causing them to 
cleave to the function and motion that are in them, 
as the earth revolves under its own gravitative im- 
pulse. The moral nature is looked on as merely 
formal, didactic, preceptive ; it is rather the very 
essence, the organizing power of spiritual life ; and 
unless one is by it thrown at some point into sym- 
pathy with pregnant principles, geared into the per- 
manent world of ideas, belted to human progress, 
his work must be cold and poor and transient, wait- 
ing on oblivion. 

* Voltaire, p. 82. 






LECTURE VII. 

The balance of Two Periods, the Creative and the Critical. — The 
School of Pope — its Value — Relation to Poetry and Prose. — 
Causes which produced it, (a) Natural Sequence of Criticism on 
Creation, (b) External Influences, (c) Science and Philosophy of 
the Time. 

Social Spirit of the Period. — Improved by Literature. — The Papers 
of Steele and Addison. — Service of. — Qualities of Literary Lead- 
ership. — Chief Men — Swift and Pope, Steele and Addison. 

Two periods in English Literature stand in nat- 
ural equipoise, both great under their own specific 
forms, the creative period of the time of Queen 
Elizabeth, and the critical period of the time of 
Queen Anne. We have spoken of the transition un- 
der Dryden by which English Letters passed over 
from Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, to Pope, Swift 
and Addison. This period of pre-eminent art is held 
in very different honor by different critics, and has 
been assigned a rank varying from the highest al- 
most to the lowest. The early portion of the eigh- 
teenth century was long regarded as the Augustan 
age of England. Its spirit ruled the entire century, 
and only slowly lost ground at its close. It was* the 
reduction of its influence, the reaction against it, 
that gave occasion to a second creative period at 
the commencement of the present century, This 
artistic tendency, made ready for in a half-century, 
dominant during two-thirds of a century, and de- 
clining in the remaining third, exhibits two phases, 

(i55) 



156 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

the first under Pope and Addison, the second under 
Johnson. The key-note of its spirit and method 
was most clearly given early in the eighteenth cen- 
tury by Pope, who was its best embodiment. 

In the sesthetical product there are two constitu- 
ents, the substance and the form. Though these 
are much less separable than the way in which they 
are sometimes spoken of would seem to imply, they 
may, by the manner in which they are contemplated 
by the mind in its productive attitudes give quite 
diverse results. The intellectual substance of a 
conception may remain much the same, and yet its 
emotional force be materially modified by minor 
variations of expression ; as the same clouds accept 
a hundred shades of beauty according to the light 
that falls upon them. The emotional element is 
much more subtile and evanescent than the intel- 
lectual one, and comes and goes on conditions so 
delicate, that we are more cognizant of the results 
than of the means by which they are wrought. 

The form and spirit are so mutually dependent, 
that they only exist in and by each other. There 
can be no modification of the one member without 
a corresponding change in the other. But the 
mind, in its analytic, creative act, can bend its at- 
tention to the spiritual substance of its conception, 
made up as this is of thought and feeling; or it 
may direct its constructive vision to the form which 
the product is to assume. In the one attitude, the 
mind is more thoroughly creative, in the other, 
more carefully critical ; in the one, it works more 
from within, and thinks of the form only as the con- 



THE SCHOOL OF POPE." 1 57 

ception grows into it, and necessitates it; in the 
other, it works more from without, allows the ex- 
pression to react constantly on the idea, and give 
law to its expansion. In the first instance, we se- 
cure a living product, whose seed is in itself; in the 
second, an artistic or architectural or critical pro- 
duct, whose plan has run before it, and shaped it. 

We speak in this bald way of the two methods, 
that of Shakespeare and that of Pope, though they 
rarely or never stand apart as complete and exclu- 
sive attitudes of mind. Creation is not so absolute 
as this would imply, nor is criticism so formal. 
They are rather as the foci of an ellipse, which to- 
gether define the curve ; but in one or other of 
which its gravitating, illuminating centre, its sun, is 
located, holding the planet to its orbit, defining its 
periods, its degrees of light and darkness, heat and 
cold. 

In the school of Pope, it was the critical func- 
tion that was uppermost. This did not arise by ac- 
cident, or by the force of circumstances merely ; he 
early proposed to himself this precise kind of effort. 
Mr. Walsh, "The knowing Walsh," as Pope styles 
him, addressed him this counsel at the opening of 
his career, which met with acceptance : "We had 
several great poets," said he, "but we never had 
one great poet that was. correct; and hi advised me 
to make that my study and aim." A poet whose 
superiority over other great poets is to be found in 
his correctness, this is the project of Pope and his 
friend. The scheme evidently promises more for- 
mal than substantial merit. Technical precision 



158 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

may be reached, but what will become of greatness ? 
There is danger that those birds of the free, upper 
air will hardly consort with the new-comer, not- 
withstanding the careful preening of his every feath- 
er. The dash and whirl of the thunder-cloud beget 
some ruffled plumage. The idea of great poets, 
who are not in the main correct poets, either springs 
from confusion of thought, or belittles correctness 
into a studious observance of the secondary rules 
of composition. To this labor, then, of cold, out- 
side scrutiny. Pope and his cotemporaries set them- 
selves. The favorite measure of the time, a rhymed, 
decasyllabic, two-lined stanza was especially predis- 
posed to a monotonous neatness of movement, an 
antithetic structure of the thought, an adroit, quick 
turn of the expression, which should make them- 
selves sensible each instant, like waves that strike 
the shore under firm winds, in one unbroken ca- 
dence. Probably this poise and thrumming of the 
thought, by which it fell into the cold pulsations of 
an unvarying rhythm, have never surpassed the point 
of neatness attained by Pope, and accomplished all 
that art of this mechanical grade could reach. 

The real value of this kind of excellence it is 
not easy to determine with precision, different 
minds estimate it so differently. The cotempora- 
ries of Pope, and a large portion of those who im- 
mediately followed him, gave him rank among the 
first English poets. Critics of the present cen- 
tury have fallen off, many of them greatly, from this 
high praise ; though some still speak of him in 
terms of the warmest eulogy. Thackeray says, 



POPE. 159 

"Besides that brilliant genius and immense fame, 
for both of which we should respect him, men of 
letters should admire him as being the greatest lit- 
erary artist that England has seen." * Is there not 
either a disparagement of art in this passage, or an 
exaggerated valuation of the excellencies of Pope ? 
Either Shakespeare and Milton are not artists, or 
they are, according to this judgment, inferior in art 
to Pope. If they are not artists, what on the whole 
is art worth ? or if they are artists, is it in the trivi- 
alities of a trade whose drift is execution, or in the 
sublime forces of creation that Pope surpasses 
them ? If in the first, what does the implied praise 
amount to? if in the second, how does the world 
misunderstand itself. With a like feeling Thackeray 
speaks of the close of the Dunciad : " In these as- 
tonishing lines Pope reaches, I think, to the very 
greatest height which his sublime art has attained, 
and shows himself the equal of all poets of all time. 
It is the brightest ardor, the loftiest assertion of 
truth, the most generous wisdom, illustrated by the 
noblest poetic figure, and spoken in words the apt- 
est, grandest and most harmonious." f When we 
read this passage, and then turn to the lines of 
Pope referred to, the praise seems to us excessive. 

" She comes ! she comes ! the sable throne behold 
Of night primeval, and of Chaos old ! 
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay, 
And all its varying rainbows die away. 
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, 
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. 

* English Humorists. f Ibid. 



l60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, 
The sick'ning stars fade off th' etherial plain ; 
As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand oppressed, 
Closed one by one to everlasting rest ; 
Thus, at her fell approach and secret might, 
Art after Art goes out, and all is night. 
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, 
Mountains of casuistry heap'd o'er her head ! 
Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before, 
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. 
Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires, 
And unawares, Morality expires. 
Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine ; 
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine. 
Lo ! thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored. 
Light dies before thy uncreating word ; 
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall, 
And universal darkness buries all." 

The thought in this passage barely sustains the 
expression. It is not the breaking out of senti- 
ments that lift and impel upward the language. 

It may help us in a just estimate of this period, 
as compared with the creative periods that went 
before it and followed it, to observe the direction 
which its critical temper gave it. Three leading 
poems of Pope are the Essay on Man, a didactic 
poem ; The Dunciad, a satire ; and The Rape of 
the Lock, a mock-heroic poem. Thus none of 
them lie in the most central fields of a creative im- 
agination, but only skirt them. It is merely the 
slopes and lowlands of Pasnassus that are here cul- 
tivated, made to blossom with the nutritious lentils 
of philosophy, or sown to the dragon teeth of satire, 
or purpled over with the poppy, yielding .its mock 
visions, its weird and sportive fancies. The high, 



POPE. 161 

the holy, the real ; the epic, the dramatic, the lyric ; 
achievement, conflict, the song that searches the 
heart with its tender, echoing sentiments, are all 
forgotten in favor of a cold philosophy, culling pre- 
cepts, and neatly putting chance principles in aim- 
less prudential fashion ; in favor of the bitter words 
of genuine hatred, and the mock words of ironical 
respect. 

We shall also remember to advantage, in 
judging these artists, the relatively high estimate 
they themselves made of poets of quite secondary 
powers, of the calibre of Waller and Denham, in 
contrast with Spenser and Shakespeare. 

Not only was the poetry of the time largely 
didactic, it was outranked, if not absolutely, yet 
relatively, by the literary prose of the period. 
The relative position of prose in English litera- 
ture has never been higher than at this date. 
This excellence may fairly be regarded as the dis- 
tinguishing literary feature of the age. Addison 
and Swift and Steele gave prose new force and 
beauty, devoted it to ends as aesthetical at least 
as those which engaged poetry, and made it a 
rival in public attention. The satire of Swift was 
more varied and vigorous than that of Pope, and 
lost little or nothing by its prose form. The es- 
says of Addison were filled with sentiments more 
gentle and delicate, and hardly less imaginative 
and complete, than the best which belonged to the 
poems of the critical school. It is plain, then, 
that this period forsook the higher regions of art, 
set poetry and prose to much the same tasks, 



1 62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

gathered and folded in one enclosure its flocks 
and herds whether from the rocks above or the 
meadows below, and entered on a safe, serviceable, 
dilettant husbandry of its resources, far more ad- 
vantageous to the reflective and critical than to 
the inventive faculties ; to prose, in its patient, 
plodding functions, than to poetry, in its bold in- 
sight, free aspirations, and tender, sympathetic 
responses. 

Poetry had already reached the central prin- 
ciples of art, principles which lie a primitive 
frame-work of strength in all products of a truly 
great and original cast. It had thus compara- 
tively little to expect from art, and lay open to the 
danger of a petty, superficial and exasperating criti- 
cism, that, forgetful of form as the expression of in- 
terior force, should refine upon it as a distant ele- 
ment, and, proud of minor corrections, set up in- 
flexible methods and dead canons for the making 
of living things. Prose, on the other hand, an 
object hitherto of much less careful and refined 
attention, less sensitive in its structure, more 
homely and useful in its purpose, was quite ready 
to be profited by a new infusion of art, to be 
shaped as an instrument more aptly to its ends, 
and to accept at once a more artistic form and 
office. It was rescued from the harsh and ex- 
clusive service of dialectics and dogmatism, re- 
tained by the fancy and social sentiments, and 
set to a task of mingled pleasure and instruction. 
Thus the profiting of the period accrued to prose 
rather than to poetry; this for the first time be- 



CRITICISM FOLLOWS INVENTION. 1 63 

came a fine art, and in the essay, took rank as 
an aesthetical product. 

The causes which produced this artistic period 
were various. In the first place, a natural, al- 
most inevitable, literary movement involved it. 
Great originality and inventive power cannot last 
long. There is not strength enough to sustain 
them, to hold unweariedly the gigantic stride 
they involve. Fortune is too sparing in her gifts 
of genius to the race for this. But at the ad- 
vanced position reached by invention, when the 
general mind is yet lively and restless, an ocean 
swept by a storm that cannot at once sink into 
repose, criticism and art take up their tasks with 
peculiar advantage. Unable to rival in new 
fields of effort the works before them, poets and 
writers are nevertheless too much lifted and 
quickened by past successes to fall into mere 
servile imitation. They become pupils, inquire 
into the method and details of previous products, 
and conceive the idea of perfecting them. They 
have before them abundant material, from which 
to derive the rules of art, to which to apply them ; 
they nurse a critical taste, and reach a pleasant 
sense of personal power, not to say superiority, 
in laying down the precepts of more careful and 
considerate work. Thus it almost inevitably hap- 
pens, that each great philosopher has his dis- 
ciples, who correct and expand his system ; each 
painter of inventive power is followed by a school 
of not unworthy men, who go forward to apply 
the new idea, develop its possibilities, and lay 



164 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

down its rules. An age of invention, in expend- 
ing itself, naturally gives rise to one of art. 

Such was the sequence of the age of Pope 
upon that of Shakespeare, growing out of it un- 
der the transition period of Dryden. It could 
scarcely happen otherwise than that the later 
poets, losing the powerful, free impulse of the 
earlier ones, should strive to replace it by 
greater painstaking, should set themselves the 
feasible labor of refining upon their method. 

The same influences, moreover, which had 
wrought for art in .the transition period, still re- 
mained operative. The commanding age in French 
literature, that of Louis XIV., was still in force; 
and though political events less favored than in 
previous years the transfer of the French spirit, 
the French literature itself was more controlling 
than ever. Pope's Essay on Criticism unites itself 
to the precepts of Boileau and of Horace, and shows 
whence the current of his ideas descended to him. 
The classical influence was yet more independently 
powerful at this time than the French. The renais- 
sance spirit was uppermost in France and in Eng- 
land, and as has been usual with it in art, begot 
imitation and servitude rather than power. Arnold 
says of Pope, "The classical poets soon became his 
chief study and delight, and he valued the moderns 
in proportion as they had drunk more or less deeply 
of the classical spirit. The genius of the Gothic or 
Romantic ages inspired him at this time with no 
admiration whatever. He can find no bright spot 
in the thick intellectual darkness from the downfall 



CLASSICAL INFLUENCE. 165 

of the Western Empire to the age of Leo X." • 
How impossible is it even for that which is best to 
confer unmingled good ! How much barren, un- 
fruitful admiration has Greek art, poetry, sculpture 
and architecture, begotten ; drawing the thoughts 
of men backward, and binding them to that already 
done, rather than inspiring them for new achieve- 
ment ! The German must build his national Wal- 
halla as a Greek temple, and adorn the palaces of 
his princes with Grecian stories, and that too when 
descended from an ancestry who could help to 
strike out and carry forward the bolder and more 
inspired styles of Gothic architecture. The classi- 
cal spirit, revived in remote races and times, devotes 
those who implicitly receive it to comparative ster- 
ility. They can scarcely restore the past, certainly 
not enlarge it ; and in the effort to do this, they 
waste the present and lose the future. The Greek 
is what he is to us because he was intensely true to 
himself, nursed and honored his own life. On these 
conditions only shall we command the generations 
that are to follow. They will hold lightly the 
shadowy outlines of an older life that we may be 
found painfully yet faintly renewing. 

Taine says, "The arts require idle, delicate 
minds, not stoics, especially not Puritans, easily 
shocked by dissonance, inclined to sensuous pleas- 
ure, employing their long periods of leisure, their 
free reveries, in harmoniously arranging, and with 
no other object but enjoyment, forms, colors and 

* Arnold's English Literature, 245. 



1 66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH. LITERATURE. 

sounds."- ;j This is the Frenchman's view of art, 
and the one that partially prevailed in England 
at this period, prevailed so far as such sen- 
timents could find transfer to the more earnest, 
practical, English mind. What it achieved we 
see, the results hardly commend the theory. 
When the artist has no other object than en- 
joyment in view, we believe that he will find 
great difficulty in realizing even this. High pleas- 
ure, like real excellence, is born of a more sturdy, 
and powerfully directed spirit. Witness the severe 
temperament and indomitable ideas that ruled 
Michael Angelo. It is the execution of cherished 
purposes, obedience to ideas, that confers pleasure, 
not pleasure that enthrones ideas. High enjoyment 
is ever incident to high action. 

Another influence, aiding this tendency to art, 
were the science and the philosophy of this and the 
previous period. When natural science is pre-emi- 
nent over philosophy, when philosophy leans to 
materialism, to an interpretation of the laws of 
mind by those of matter, to a reference of knowl- 
edge exclusively to the perceptive and analytic fac- 
ulties, we are sure to have a cool and critical, rather 
than a warm and creative, social atmosphere; one 
of skepticism and overthrow, rather than of belief 
and spiritual construction. Science plays a most 
inevitable and essential part in progress ; but it 
does not, especially in its earlier stages, when it is 
coming in contact with many inadequate beliefs, and 
overthrowing them, give inspiration to the higher, 

* English Literature, vol. i. p. 332. 



SCIENCE, ITS INFLUENCE. 167 

intuitive, trusting, ethical impulses of the soul. It 
tends to a wavering, uncertain and superficial senti- 
ment on all questions that pertain to man and his 
destiny, a sentiment like that which pervades the 
Essay on Man, one of whose fundamental conclu- 
sions Pope is said to have exactly reversed under 
a transient wind of criticism. The philosophy of 
Locke, the science of Newton, the skepticism of Bo- 
lingbroke, were affiliated forces, largely good in 
themselves, with an immeasurable overbalance of 
good in their results ; yet begetting an adventurous, 
uncertain, unbelieving temper, disinclined to pledge 
itself unreservedly to any spiritual faith, to any 
principle or precept of religious belief; and hence 
ready for a cool rendering of the heart, an outlook 
of immediate pleasure and comfort on society and 
art. There cannot be devotion, heroism, sacrifice 
in the primarily skeptical spirit; and hence there 
cannot be profound sympathy with that art in which 
the human soul is tossed by deep, unquiet emotions, 
refusing to be lulled into the rest of the passing 
hour, but seeming to feel far off forces at work be- 
low the horizon, the promises of invisible good, the 
presages of invisible evil. The things astir in the 
unseen world affect such a mind, and will not leave 
it solely attentive to the lazy, measured rhythm, of 
a summer's day. It floats on a sea alive with the 
long swell of distant tempests. Science had begun 
its work of demolition ; philosophy affrighted, was 
forsaking its own principles, and seeking grounds 
of alliance with the new tendencies ; religion with 
too little power to modify its belief, to take new po- 



1 68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

sitions, to reform and restate and redefend its prin- 
ciples, was losing hold on the minds of many, and, 
like a wall that is shaken, began to show unexpected 
traces ,of weakness and insecurity. It was ceasing 
to rule by authority, and had not yet learned to 
rule by reason. There was thus a loss in enthu- 
siasm. Men were seized with worldly prudence, 
were not ready for the long ventures of the spiritual 
' world, its patient waiting, and impalpable promises ; 
they cast about them for a more immediate good, a 
more hasty and formal pleasure. This is the ten- 
dency which art, that has become artistic, exacting 
and sensitive, is ready to accept, finding its office 
in contributing a gloss of superficial excellence, an 
elegance open to the senses, which, if it holds no 
weighty claims against the future, redeems the 
present to good cheer and elegant culture. The 
lake ripples and sparkles in the sunshine, and we 
stop not to ask what skeletons of death are hidden 
under its waters. These were the days of unbelief 
and feeble belief that were later to call forth the 
reasonings of Butler, and the zeal of the Wesleys. 
The political and social spirit which belonged 
to the reigns of William and Anne, was more .vigor- 
ous and healthy than that of the previous period. 
The close, sultry, feverish air that attended on the 
Stuarts, surrounding them, like the pent-up breath 
of a night revel, to which the morning freshness of 
a new day has not yet found entrance, had begun 
to clear away. In the struggle of liberty, the cir- 
cuit of aggression, resistance, reaction and com- 
promise had been completed. The commonwealth 



POLITICAL EVENTS. 1 69 

had been followed by the restoration ; this in turn 
intolerable had been succeeded by the revolution, 
and William came to the throne the representative 
of progressive and revolutionary, yet constitutional 
and monarchical, liberty. Thus was closed in mu- 
tual concession and the permanent gains of good 
government the most violent series of events that 
has fallen to the peaceful progress of England. 
The political parties of this reign ceased to be fac- 
tions, and struggled with each other for the guid- 
ance of a government which neither proposed to 
modify or resist. The Tories by affiliation and de- 
scent had taken the place of the royalist. Their 
central idea was authority ; for them the chief vir- 
tue of a subject was submission. This party was 
principally composed of intelligent and designing 
leaders, of ignorant and prejudiced followers. No 
party, as our own national experience abundantly 
shows us, responds with so firm and patient a front 
to the rallying cry, as one in which the cunning of 
the few is mated with the credulity of the many. 
It is this inevitable union of intrigue and ignorance 
that sustains selfish and unscrupulous power. Well 
might . such a party urge passive submission ; the 
high in state and church profited by it, the low 
knew no other loyalty or religion. The leaders 
gladly held what they had ; the followers easily re- 
signed what they never hoped to have. Words are 
better rallying forces than ideas for the masses of 
men ; they involve for their partisans no discus- 
sions, and hence no divisions ; they exact from 
chiefs no concessions, and hence look to no sacri- 
8 



I/O THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

fices. All that was hereditary, stubborn, uncon- 
cessive and selfish in English society settled by its 
own weight and downward bent into the Tory 
party. All, on the other hand, that was liberal, 
active and progressive, yet sufficiently moderate to 
hope for power, belonged to the Whigs, the politi- 
cal descendants of the Round-heads. Parties bid- 
ding for power, eager-eyed for the possibilities of 
success, are always more or less corrupt, warped 
from their true tendencies. Individual ambition 
will strive to lay hold of and use the party organiza- 
tion for its own private ends. Submission will be 
enforced by urging the necessities of the party, and 
thus its unity and zeal will throw it only the more 
completely into the hands of the unscrupulous. The 
right to think is the right to bolt. Aside, however, 
from personal distractions, the central sympathy, the 
prevailing purpose of the Whigs, was constitutional 
liberty. They included the liberal, independent, 
thoughtful minds of the nation, the midway men, 
who have much to gain and much to lose, who love 
their own thoughts, and covet the power to form 
and execute their own plans. These two parties, 
Tory and Whig, representing the old extremes, 
had drawn so near together as to lay aside the 
sword, and enter on a perpetual parley of words 
and measures, a competition for the control of a 
sovereignty both were prepared to respect. 

A corresponding improvement was taking place 
in public manners and morals. The literature of 
the period more than concurred with this ; it 
advanced it in a positive way. The papers which 



THE PAPERS OF STEELE. IJl 

originated with Steele, and included the best efforts 
of Addison, were a social evangel. The corrupt dra- 
matists of the previous reign, who owed so much of 
their taint to the court whose patronage they 
sought, had passed away. William, with little lit- 
erary sympathy, did not merely bring with him a 
sounder, more wholesome life, one of more earnest 
and serviceable purposes, he was inclined to leave 
letters to a more independent and thus to a more 
healthy development. The ne'glect of courts is 
often better than their favor. The liberty and dis- 
interestedness of art are both essential to its high- 
est excellence. The moment it becomes a retainer, 
and is compelled to make itself agreeable, it loses 
the inspiration of freedom, the guidance of its own 
creative insight. Patronage is to art a qualified 
good. 

These papers, which now came forward to take 
the place in literary influence of the drama, and 
which present the prose of English literature in its 
very best dress, sprang from a broad, generous, and 
skilfully conceived purpose. They aimed at what 
they did much to accomplish, a social regeneration. 
They depended on the general patronage, taken in 
its most fluctuating form, and thus rested on their 
own merit. They were able to soften public senti- 
ment, to correct taste, improve manners, and bear 
with them a genial ethical spirit, only as they could 
instruct and delight their readers, and increase their 
numbers. They were admirably fitted to this pur- 
pose. Short, returning at brief intervals, with no 
close connection and with great variety of contents, 



172 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

they could hardly fail to awaken attention, and keep 
alive curiosity. They were exactly fitted to the 
times. They were a fresh and palatable invention, 
and came to the club and the coffee-house with 
pleasing topics, offering a creditable variety of fare. 
Nothing could exceed the ingenuity with which 
these papers were devised, and the skill with which 
they were written. We may also add, that this 
effort was animated by a correspondingly high pur- 
pose. Says Addison, in the sixth number of the 
Spectator, " It is a mighty shame and dishonor to 
employ excellent faculties and abundance of wit 
to humor and please men in their viceSsand follies." 
Again in the tenth number he says : — " I shall en- 
deavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper 
wit with morality, that my readers may, if possible, 
both ways find their account in the speculation of 
the day. And to the end that their virtue and dis- 
cretion may not be short, transient, intermitting 
starts of thought, I have resolved to refresh their 
memories from day to day, till I have recovered 
them out of that desperate state of vice and 
folly, into which the age has fallen. The mind 
that lies fallow but a single day sprouts up. in fol- 
lies that are only to be killed by a constant and 
assiduous culture. It was said by Socrates, that he 
brought philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit 
among men ; and I shall be ambitious to have it 
said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of 
closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell 
in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee- 
houses." 



THE PAPERS OF STEELE. 1 73 

This purpose, thus distinctly announced, was 
carried forward with great fertility of resources, 
variety of methods, and vivacity and ease of style. 
Pure, idiomatic, simple English afforded fresh, 
flexible expression ; while satire, allegory, imper- 
sonation, the changing characters of a club, letters, 
and many a nameless conceit besides, served to 
diversify and support the critical function. The 
inventions of Addison were exhaustless, and a 
benignant temper and graceful fancy adorned 
them all. These papers were very successful in 
their own time, and have since remained classics in 
our literature. They owe their success, first, to the 
nobility of their purpose, and afterward to their 
humor, variety, good sense, moderation, and ele- 
gance. Each of these qualities they possess in a 
high degree. The mirth of these pieces is mild, 
pervasive humor, imparting a pleasant glow of 
thought, and wooing the reader along a sunny, 
cheerful path. Satire is constantly directed against 
every form of social offence, but it is that genial 
satire which awakens attention to a fault rather 
than censures it, and enables us to look with the 
discrimination of a stranger at our own actions. 

Of the second quality, Addison himself says, 
" There is nothing which I study so much, in the 
course of these my daily dissertations, as variety." 
Yet the arc which he and his friend Steele trav- 
ersed was not the entire circle of human passion. 
It usually excluded profound emotion, whether of 
awe, pathos, terror, anger or indignation. Strong 
feeling, rising like a hurricane to sweep away 



174 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

opposition, was consonant neither with their tem- 
per nor purpose. They looked for reform, but a 
reform that should be initiated in pleasure, and 
flow on of its own sweet will in the channels of 
enjoyment opening before it. Hence they swept 
round from satire to reflection, and reflection back 
to satire, through a luminous curve of whimsi- 
cality, caricature, story, portrait, description, alle- 
gory, criticism and speculation. 

The cardinal quality of these papers is their 
good sense ; this never forsakes them. Their 
philosophy presents it in a penetrative, their 
humor in a pungent, form. Their criticisms on 
society are as just as they are amiable. Their 
analysis is correct and practical, their moral re- 
flections, impressive and natural. This good sense 
was most effective in securing uniform success. 
It gave a restraint and proportion to what was 
said that made it difficult to be resisted, and im- 
possible to be controverted. Whatever the object 
of satire, the pedantry of learning, the conceit of 
rank, the foppishness of dress, the frivolity of eti- 
quette, the prejudice of partisanship, the same 
sober, sound opinion underlay and sustained the 
attack. 

Moderation was even more worthy of commenda- 
tion then than now. The art of achieving a true 
success is found very much in tempering zeal to a 
just moderation. Steel that is too hard is fractured 
at every blow ; draw the temper too much and it 
becomes iron. The Damascus blade, with its 
tough and steady edge clings to that nice line that 



ADDISON. 175 

divides excess and deficiency. From this middle 
region, Steele seems to have been inclined to range 
upward, and Addison downward. He complains of 
Addison, that "he blew a lute when he should sound 
a trumpet ; " yet the lute notes of the one went 
farther than the trumpet tones of the other. 

The crowning quality of these papers, as works 
of literature, is their elegance. This made of prose 
a fine art, and ranked its best productions, with 
those of poetry, among the permanent products of 
taste. This excellence was fully achieved, for the first 
time in our literature, by Addison ; and since his day 
elegant culture has found constant expression in 
prose. The art of Addison is far less cold and 
critical than that of Pope. It preserves its free- 
dom, and moves with a simplicity and ease, that 
are open indeed to error, but are also able to make 
that error seem slight and unimportant. There is 
in his style no opposition between nature and art ; 
the substance and form remain inseparable, the 
thought lifting itself into light and being at once, 
rising in a single creative act out of the chaos of 
material. 

The force of the moral element is freely dis- 
closed in these works of Addison. Many graces 
and much good-will come to his aid, as he marks 
out a pure and reformatory path, and accepts the 
bias and freedom and boldness of his best impulses 
in pursuing it. Prose touched the meridian of art 
at the same instant that it culminated in a catho- 
lic, wholesome and sincere spirit. There was in- 
deed much in the temperate, mild form of the ethi- 



I76 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

cal impulse to favor this sensitive and considerate 
art. More force would have been less appreci- 
ative, less careful ; would have rushed in a heed- 
less, headstrong way to its goal. It also favored 
prose as against poetry, and a poetry of art, as 
against one of creation. Inspiration is the life of 
poetry, emotion its very substance ; and these are 
easily lost under those quiet, aesthetic tendencies 
which ripen prose. Poetry is likely to predomi- 
nate in a vigorous age, and to master those strong 
spirits, whose tension of soul is sufficient for its 
service. 

The supremacy which fell to a single person in 
the previous period was in this divided. During 
the reign of Charles, a reckless and corrupt temper 
controlled literature. This spirit Dryden accepted, 
and consolidated his authority under it. In the 
reign of Anne, different opinions found recognition 
in popular productions, and the influence of the 
leaders of literature was affected by their political 
sentiments. Pope and Swift were Tories, Addison 
and Steele Whigs, and this fact was one ground 
of divided authority. The temper of the two typi- 
cal literary leaders, Pope and Addison, was a farther 
occasion of separation. Pope, sensitive, exacting 
and irritable, was early displeased with Addison, 
misinterpreted the counsel he gave him, and found 
in him too mild, or, as it seemed to Pope, too cold, 
a temper for his own moods of bitterness. Addi- 
son could not unite with Pope in his harsh, person- 
al asperities. The irritation of Pope passed into 
aversion, and the two maintained as unfriendly 



LEADERSHIP. I J J 

a relation as the gentleness of Addison would 
admit. 

The natural powers of neither of these leaders 
fitted them for the undivided control which fell to 
Dryden. Pope was too feeble in body, and too ir- 
ritable in disposition, to venture on the late hours, 
exposure and hard-won supremacy of the club and 
coffee-house. Addison was too diffident and taci- 
turn, too select and retiring in his tastes, to seek or 
to enjoy the public and familiar intercourse of a 
literary coterie, or at least to make it a means of 
self-assertion and uncontroverted authority. Hence 
there arose a quiet partition of power in the domain 
of letters. Addison, in the line of regal de- 
scent, held sway at Button's, opposite Will's. He 
gathered to himself Budgell, Tickell, Phillips, Steele. 
Pope, unable to endure the physical strain which 
the rollicksome clubs of the coffee-house put upon 
their members, and with a secret disrelish of de- 
pendence, retired to Twickenham, and there, in 
his own villa, maintained a more moderate and 
splendid court. Swift was strongly attached to 
him. Garth, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, Gay, Prior 
belonged to his circle of friends. 

These four men, Swift and Pope, Steele and 
Addison, gave by their individual characteristics 
the controlling personal elements to the age, and 
constituted two groups of rival power, but unlike 
temper. Indeed the secondary vigor and artistic 
force of the time are seen in the absence of any 
overshadowing personal power. The composite 
tendency had the upper hand of separate life. 



I78 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Swift possessed a sharp, most incisive mind, 
which he was wont to use as the cruel weapon of 
morbid, exacting, unhesitating passions. He was 
powerful to do mischief and had the practical pre- 
dilection for it of a street brawler. He was himself 
incapable of happiness, and could not but worry 
and wound those whom he approached, and those 
the most who were the most attached to him. His 
insanity and idiocy were the physical and spiritual 
fruits of a morbid temper, and were, as germinant 
seeds, long and deeply hidden in his constitution. 
The contempt, almost hatred, of men, shown in his 
satires, evinces a mind at war with itself, ceasing 
to delight in its own activities, chafing at its pur- 
suits, and clashing in a mad way with its own good 
and the good of others. The most undeniable tal- 
ent and wayward temper united to make him for- 
midable, one who was sure to inflict injury, though 
the portion which fell to his enemies was hardly 
greater than that which he brought to himself and 
his friends. He won love to outrage and waste it ; 
he gained power to plant fierce, bruising blows in 
the teeth and eyes of men, leaving to accident and 
prejudice to decide who should be his adversaries. 
Yet, viewed from within, his character at times as- 
sumed quite another appearance, and was lighted 
up by generous and sincere emotion. We are led 
to feel that he himself was overborne by those 
biting passions which made him, in so much of 
his outward activity, the fierce assailant, the bitter 
and cruel satirist. 

Pope was a man of great and obedient talent — 



POPE. 179 

some would say of genius. He brought ample re- 
sources to the tasks he set himself, but there was 
less inspiration in them, either of belief or of feel- 
ing, than in those of any other great poet. The 
invocation with which his Essay on Man draws to 
an end, well expresses his temper and his triumphs : 

" Come then, my friend, my genius, come along ; 
Oh master of the poet and the song ! 
And while the muse now stoops, or now ascends, 
To man's low passions, or their glorious ends, 
Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise, 
To fall with dignity, with temper rise ; 
Formed by thy converse, happily to steer, 
From grave to gay, from lively to severe ; 
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, 
Intent to reason, polite to please." 

Here is the diplomatist of letters, who coolly 
studies his times, the temper of men's minds, and 
adroitly guides his steps among them. He drives 
his Pegasus in embossed harness, in tricksy fashion. 
Pope added to an irritable self-consciousness some- 
thing of the biting passion of Swift. They were 
confederate and rival masters of satire. 

The second fraternity, that of Steele and Addi- 
son, was most gentle and humane. Steele exem- 
plified the strong, heedless, generous impulses of 
his Irish nationality. He would have been consist- 
ently good, had he not so relished the pleasures 
which lie on the border-ground of evil. These he 
gathered, tearfully cast away, and recklessly gath- 
ered again ; his sins each time giving a new pur- 
chase and provocation to his virtues. While we 
owe much to him, and feel a sympathy with him, 



l80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

paled in the light of his powers by the over-shadow- 
ing presence of Addison, we yet accept as our 
chief debt his indirect service in calling Addison 
to the support and development of the first serials, 
the Tatler and the Spectator. 

Addison's tact, skill and resources were those 
of genius. A spontaneous fecundity and power of 
adaptation had fallen to him, and Steele stepped in 
at the critical moment to determine the form of the 
result. Addison led a prosperous and pleasant life, 
and, with a kind and generous nature, scattered 
freely its blessings. His chief fault was social ; he 
sometimes smothered the fires of intellect in the va- 
porings of intoxication, an inverted torch quenched 
in its own oil. Addison occupies in English litera- 
ture a place only second to that of its great mas- 
ters. We admire the balance, goodness and fruit- 
fulness of his faculties, yet can hold intercourse 
with him without the separation and awe of sur- 
passing greatness. A polished shaft in the temple 
of letters, we are more struck with the beauty of 
workmanship than with the weight supported. Our 
tribute to him is one of good- will even more than 
of admiration, though admiration is never wanting. 
It is not often that so large a social obligation adds 
itself to a literary one ; we put as the supreme 
point in the man the purity of his spirit, the gener- 
osity of his temper, and rejoice that his excellent 
work stands fast by the altar of worship. There 
are two deeply shaded walks, the one at Oxford, 
the other at Dublin, associated with the name of 
Addison. They well express the gentle, meditative, 



ADDISON. l8l 

benignant temper of the man, drawing inspiration 
from the quietness of nature, and giving it in the 
quietness of his own soul. The points of loving 
contact between man and the external world help 
to define the quality of that secret life which the 
mind cherishes. They disclose its most free and 
tender affinities, and that on which it is fed day 
by day. 



LECTURE VIII. 

Relations of Periods. — Contrast between the First and Second 
Phase of the Critical Period, (a) In Prose Composition, (b) In 
Style. — Johnson's Style. — Pre-eminence of Prose. — Theology. — 
Metaphysics. — Political Science. — History. — Oratory. — Rhet- 
oric. — The Novel. — Authority of Johnson. — Grounds of. — Char- 
acter of his Criticism. 

We are now to speak of the second phase of the 
artistic period, falling to the middle of the eigh- 
teenth century. Again we see that periods, as in- 
dicating the prevalence of particular influences, 
have no definite bounds. There is very little in 
intellectual forces, either in their origin or their 
end, which is instantaneous or abrupt. They over- 
lie each other, interpenetrate each other, and grad- 
ually grow out of each other, under the slow victory 
of new tendencies, under the slow expenditure of 
old ones. Associated conditions secure a gangli- 
onic centre, and increase and diminish in power as 
we approach or recede from it ; while the forces 
that are to rule a subsequent age are already 
springing up among them. The art which in Eng- 
lish literature had culminated in Pope and Addison 
did not pass away quickly. It was a vigorous and 
deep-rooted tendency, and did not easily yield pos- 
session of the national soil. It assumed a second 
form before it began to give ground to the forces 
that supplanted it. There was far too much strength, 

(182) 



SECOND PHASE OF THE CRITICAL PERIOD. 1 83 

too much freshness and individuality of thought, too 
little extravagance and affectation of method, too 
much common sense and English sympathy, in the 
writers of the reign of Queen Anne to allow them 
to be easily pushed aside. For one full generation 
after them, the literary momentum of their works 
was unabated ; and only slowly, as the last century 
was drawing to a close, and the present century was 
opening, did vigorous reactionary tendencies dis- 
close themselves. 

Yet the second phase of this period, that which 
is marked by the autocracy of Johnson, differed in 
some decided features from the first, under the 
divided rule of Pope and Addison. In the early 
portion, poetry and prose stood in fair equipoise. 
The influence of Pope was not secondary to that of 
Addison. If he is not to be ranked with the great 
creative minds of our literature, yet this was not 
the feeling of his cotemporaries concerning him. 
There were no honors which they of his own time, 
or the times immediately subsequent, were disposed 
to withhold from him. That he has fallen to a 
lower position is due to the verdict of later judges. 
The artist who rules by art, who, in the incipient 
conflict that is always springing up between creation 
and art, sides with the latter, almost always leads 
his generation. Art, passing from its unconscious 
and creative to its conscious and preceptive stage, 
in its clear, critical, formal procedure, flatters our 
vanity of knowledge, and meets with easy and quiet 
admiration. It is only when it strikes upward or 
outward in growth farther than we can follow it, 



I84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

that it is compelled to wait for a first, second, or 
third generation to reach its level, and enter into its 
spirit. Art that is merely garnering the past is 
popular ; it is only when it attempts to break new 
ground for the future, that it encounters the farriers 
of prejudice. 

In the later portion of this period, no one in 
poetry stood up in the place of Pope. No one pos- 
sessed equal weight with him, or could for a moment 
challenge his rank. Poetry that many would now 
prefer to that of Pope belonged to the time of John- 
son, yet there was no poet who was so productive, 
who held the same available power, or could com- 
mand any considerable part of the influence which 
fell so easily to the corypheus of art. Quantity has 
some weight even in poetry, and the prodigal abun- 
dance of a fruitful mind gives to it a position it can- 
not claim by any single production, though that pro- 
duction be its very best. The second moiety of the 
artistic period differed then from the first, in the pre- 
eminence of one mind, and differed from it and 
from every previous period in our literature, in the 
pre-eminence of prose over poetry. As the poems 
of Johnson are related to his other works, so was 
the poetry of his time to its prose productions. 
There is an unmistakable predominence of this sec- 
ondary branch of literature, which indicates the 
period to be one peculiarly degenerate in art. 
Poetry had become sparse, sporadic, and was wait- 
ing for a new development ; prose was prolific, domi- 
nant, critical, taking vigorous possession of new 
fields. 



ASCENDENCY OF PROSE. 1 85 

The reason, for this, or rather one reason for it, 
it is not difficult to render. Criticism always makes 
for the relative enlargement of prose in several 
ways. Art, in its critical, speculative bearing, is a 
triumph of the intellect over the emotions, and is 
thus an extension of the sphere of thought. The 
didactic spirit is uppermost, and finds in prose its 
ready and fitting instrument. The dominant ten- 
dency is one which stands in direct, intrinsic affinity 
with this simple, and, for mere truth, primary, form 
of composition, and cannot fail, therefore, often to 
prefer it. The impulse which at another time would 
expend itself in a poem, will now be taken up by a 
critique ; and a dissertation on method will be sub- 
stituted for performance. Further, art being every- 
where active as a formative, external force, will lay 
hold of prose, reshape it, give it new excellencies, and 
be proportionately enamored of it. There was little 
for the critical feeling merely to prefer in the poems 
of Pope above the papers of Addison. In some 
respects, the latter held the advantage as against 
the former.' Their beauties were fresh, spontaneous 
and natural. Poetry was passing its zenith, prose 
was mounting to it. This was for the first time 
coming into the power that belonged to it, while 
that was only gathering a second and inferior har- 
vest. The intrinsic force of the two, their spon- 
taniety, was naturally proportioned to this fact. This 
fact, then, so peculiar to the period, of the ascen- 
dency of prose, we hold to be a direct issue of the 
cold and critical temper which ruled in literature, 
calling the thoughts into unwonted activity, and 



150 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

proportionately restricting the spontaneous expres- 
sion of the emotions. Those wrought best in 
poetry who, like Goldsmith, were inevitably emo- 
tional, and could not be driven from the fastnesses 
of a tender, passionate nature, by the fashion of the 
time, or the ridicule of men. 

Another difference is found between the earlier 
portions of the century and its later years in the 
style of Johnson as contrasted with that of Ad- 
dison. Johnson, in accepted tendencies, in the 
grounds of his critical judgments, was in the line 
of direct descent from Addison ; though, by the 
formation of his own mind, he was very diverse 
from him. Following in the same form of com- 
position, he supplemented the Tatler and Spectator 
with the Idler and Rambler, and these papers 
closed this chapter of prose art in our literature. 
In their moral tone, social purpose, and critical 
spirit, the unequal portions contributed by Ad- 
dison and Johnson to the splendid completion of 
Steele's fortunate conception, were identical ; in 
aptness of execution and ease in style they were 
very different. These two men, working with one 
spirit and under similar circumstances, admirably 
illustrate the importance of the factor of original 
endowment. The manner of Addison was impos- 
sible to Johnson ; his rugged and ponderous nature 
utterly forbade it. Johnson puts himself in inev- 
itable and unfavorable contrast with Addison by 
a style inflexible, weighty, not to say heavy, and 
full of a controlling mental habit. He thus 
brought a powerful, personal element to the por- 



THE STYLE OF JOHNSON. 1 87 

tion of the period he so strongly influenced. The 
tendencies of his own nature must be added to 
those of his time, as second to them only in 
weight. His style has been thought to owe its im- 
pression to the choice of less familiar words, es- 
pecially those of Latin origin, and thus to fall 
easily into pomposity. This is scarcely a suffi- 
cient statement of the case. His style acquires 
its chief characteristics from the penetrating, analytic 
mind of the author. This imparted a reflective, 
discriminating form to his language, and led to 
a choice of words critical and explicit. His com- 
position is full of antithesis ; he carefully balances 
the thought, limits it on this side and on that, 
and exhibits it in various relations. An exact 
poise of ideas and correspondence of considera- 
tions accompany him in his composition, whether 
it be grave or humorous ; while passages made 
cumbersome by words merely, are infrequent. 
He himself has ridiculed this pretentious verbiage 
in Rasselas. " To live according to nature," said 
the philosopher, " is to act always with due regard 
to the fitness arising from the relations and qual- 
ities of causes and effects ; to concur with the 
great, unchangeable scheme of universal felicity ; 
to co-operate with the general disposition and 
tendency of the present system of things. The 
prince soon found that this was one of the sages 
whom he should understand less as he heard him 
more." 

Johnson himself was not often misled by the 
pomp of words, or occupied by mere sound. A 



1 88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

thoughtful and dignified manner, inborn to the 
style in his very conception of the topic, prepared 
the way with him for a full and formal phrase- 
ology. The idea was no more colloquial than the 
manner in which he put it. It was not a choice 
of words, but a ponderous quality and gait of 
mind, that made Johnsonese so distinguishable a 
style. The classical taste which Johnson shared 
with his time, served indeed to color the large 
vocabulary to which his discriminating, analytic 
thought gave occasion, and helped to impart an 
appearance of pomposity. 

The following example from the Idler, of 
March 15, 1756, shows the well defined, formal 
path by which he threaded his way through the 
most familiar topic. "I lived in a state of celi- 
bacy beyond the usual time. In the hurry, first 
of pleasure and afterward of business, I felt no 
want of a domestic companion ; but becoming 
weary of labor, I soon grew weary of idleness, 
and thought it reasonable to follow the custom of 
life, and to seek some solace of my cares in 
female tenderness, and some amusement of my 
leisure in female cheerfulness. 

" The choice which is long delayed is commonly 
made at last with great caution. My resolution 
was to keep my passions neutral, and to marry only 
in compliance with my reason. I drew upon a page 
of my pocket-book a scheme of all female virtues 
and vices, with the vices which border on every vir- 
tue, and the virtues which are allied to every vice. 
I considered that wit was sarcastic, and magnanim- 



JOHNSON. 189 

ity imperious ; that avarice was economical, and 
ignorance obsequious, and having estimated the good 
and evil of every quality, employed my own dili- 
gence and that of my friends to find the lady in 
whom nature and reason had reached that happy 
mediocrity which is equally remote from exuberance 
and deficiency." 

The humor of this composition lies very much in 
the deliberate, cautious manner in which a great, 
unwieldy mind moves among trifles ; selects the few 
points that promise a plausible support in its pro- 
gress, and tempers itself to a good-natured tender- 
ness toward the safety and pleasure of others. So 
an elephant might walk among sportive children. 

Here is a stiffly outlined portrait of Square Blus- 
ter: "He is wealthy without followers ; he is mag- 
nificent without witnesses ; he has birth without 
alliance, and. influence without dignity. His neigh- 
bors scorn him as a brute ; his dependants dread 
him as an oppressor; and he has the gloomy com- 
fort of reflecting that if he is hated he is likewise 
feared." 

Johnson, though grounded in the same princi- 
ples of criticism, stood in marked contrast to the 
simple, genial Addison, and united with him to 
illustrate the very different phases which one school 
of art may present. 

Addison and Johnson were alike primarily prose 
writers. In this department lay their chief work and 
their crowning excellencies. Both, however, ven- 
tured into the field of poetry, with something of the 
boldness that falls to criticism, yet with unequal sue- 



I9O THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

cess. The Cato of Addison received the highest 
praise from' Voltaire, and is one of the best plays of 
the Franco-English school. Few have done the 
Irene of Johnson any reverence. 

Having sketched the relations of the two por- 
tions of the artistic period, we wish to deepen two 
impressions concerning its later years ; first, the 
rapid development of prose ; second, the coldly 
critical dictatorship of Johnson. We have seen 
these two things to lie in the normal development 
of the forces at work. Prose henceforward in 
English literature is varied, artistic, voluminous, 
spreading far and wide into many realms of thought, 
like a swollen torrent that has escaped its mountain 
fastnesses, and covers the plain, leaving rich allu- 
vial deposits on every arable field. Theological 
composition, which more than any other kind of 
prose constituted the continuous, central current of 
this stream, was scarcely abated in its practical, 
stereotyped form, while in its defensive, speculative 
aspects, it showed new vigor. The age was critical, 
not formally so in art merely, but centrally so in 
thought also, and this too increasingly. New de- 
partments of knowledge were rapidly opening in 
the natural sciences, new methods of investigation 
were gaining ground. The minds of men were put- 
ting in many directions bolder questions, which 
called for other than conventional answers. This 
movement was met in a vigorous and truly national 
method by such writers as Berkeley, Paley and But- 
ler. New defenses were thrown up to suit the new 
attack. A force was developed within the church 



THEOLOGICAL COMPOSITION. I9I 

which showed the hold of Christian truth on the 
mind to be vital and sufficient. While Methodism 
was giving new proof of this practical control, its 
theoretical force was as signally shown by its 
apologists. The works of some of these authors 
are remarkable for their insight, as Butler's 
Analogy ; others for beauties of style and clearness 
of statement, as Paley's Natural Theology, and 
Horse Paulinse ; and others for a combination of 
these characteristics, as Berkeley's Alciphron. 

Metaphysics was relatively more fruitful even 
than theology. The Positive Philosophy has rightly 
grouped these two phases of thought, for they are 
closely dependent. In this field, the writings of 
Hume at this time mark an era ; most modern un- 
belief traces its line of descent through him. Often 
sophistically met, rarely indeed answered, and re- 
quiring for their complete refutation a profounder 
philosophy than has yet been attained by us, at 
least with any generality, his views have slowly 
penetrated the purely scientific mind, till they are 
now entrenched in it as an invincible prejudice 
against the supernatural, against every distinctively 
spiritual view. A philosophy so immediate and 
fatal in its theological inferences could not but call 
forth much activity in this department, and the 
Scotch school of metaphysicians, Reid, Stewart, 
Hamilton, began to follow in a reactionary line ; 
while an equally able series of writers developed 
the tendencies included in the works of Locke and 
Hume. 

Thus it fell to metaphysics to commence a skep- 



192 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

ticism suicidal to its own line of investigation. Its 
overthrow was a felo de se, not the work of physics. 
It is clue to Hume, pre-eminently a metaphysician, 
and to an argument to its very core metaphysical, 
more than to any other one agency, that mental sci- 
ence has fallen into such general disrepute, and been 
so far lost in physical inquiries. The end is not yet. 
We here only mark the fact, that the earlier sieges 
were laid, and the first manifest breaches opened, 
at this pregnant, critical period, in the invasion of 
the laws of mind by those of matter. No discus- 
sion more central was ever sprung upon the thoughts 
of men than the one involved in miracles ; and the 
loud acclaim with which, from time to time, the vic- 
tory of the scientists is rung out, only shows how 
far off the real issue of the battle is. The most ob- 
vious English date of the origin of this universal 
and irrepressible controversy, which colors every 
department of knowledge, and is daily gathering its 
pros and cons from every field of thought, is found 
in the prose of this time. 

From the cold speculative outlook of this era, 
there came denials which set at jar and controversy 
the two elements of creation, the natural and the 
supernatural, and strove to reduce under the rigid 
formalism of immutable law its entire handiwork. 
No discussion could be more purely critical, yet 
more profoundly significant, than this. It rested 
with it to decide in religion, philosophy and art, 
whether we were to have the mere colored rind of 
wax fruitage with which to staunch our hunger, or 
the inscrutable, unformulated life of free and inex- 



HISTORY. 193 

haustible forces — a being offered not as a finality, 
a finished product, but as a first term in the vocab- 
ulary of wisdom and of love. 

The speculative, germinant character of the 
epoch is also seen in political, social science. The 
English constitution and law found presentation ; 
and historical discussion in The Commentaries of 
Blackstone ; and Political Economy, in the works 
of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, rose to the pro- 
portions of a distinct science. That wakefulness 
of thought is here first shown which has since 
busied itself with so many social questions, past, 
present and future. 

Indeed no one thing more discloses the char- 
acter of a period than its estimate of historical 
inquiries, and historical methods of investigation ; 
than a tendency to look for the explanation of 
present states and facts in their relation to pre- 
vious ones. Herein is a due appreciation of the 
force and continuity of causes, indicating a 
thorough scientific and reformatory tendency. In 
this period there arose a very conspicuous group 
of historians, grading upward in the order given, 
Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, the last being from 
our present point of view, the most interesting. 
History has two complete products, which it 
slowly approaches. The first is a narrative of 
events, correctly and exactly sketched, propor- 
tioned one to another by intrinsic value, by the 
aggregate of human-weal involved in them, and 
rendered with the light and coloring of real life 
upon them. The historic picture thus shows 
9 



194 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

knowledge, insight, and feeling. It is no bald 
outline, nor do its leading figures lack the sym- 
metry and support of a thoroughly wrought back- 
ground of those conditions and companions of 
life which lend to them pre-eminence and value. 
Nor are the historic events merely given in light 
and shade, they are deeply tinged by the sym- 
pathies, passions, affections which made them, in 
their own day, living experiences of the gene- 
ration then passing. The second product is phi- 
losophical, a philosophy of history. The narrative 
now clings to the connection of causes. It treats 
slightly chronological dependencies. It cares not 
to be full in the statement of facts ; it would 
gladly assume a knowledge of these, and only 
brings them forward as they serve to mark the 
line of action, of significant forces transmitted 
through them, and modified by them. It searches 
for the channels, the deep under-currents, on 
which have floated down the pomp of historic 
events. Its facts are buoys and light-houses 
along this line of progress. The eddies and 
shallows and silent pools which are mere topog- 
raphy, failing to define the strength and direction 
of currents, the interlacing lines of force, it 
passes in rapid survey. It seeks only to outline 
events, and give their osseous frame-work, on which, 
as fulcrums and levers, the muscular and nervous 
energy of the time has been expended. 

These two products are reached by a long road. 
Legendary and historical traditions ; chronicles of 
easy credulity; annals with barren dates, mere 



HISTORY. 195 

pegs divested of the tapestry which should hang 
upon them ; histories that busy themselves only 
with kings and warriors, with the trappings, the 
glitter and clatter of life ; historic criticism that 
pulls to pieces this poetry of the past in search of 
the scattered, germinant facts out of which imagi- 
nation has grown its luxuriant, tangled and fanciful 
narratives ; the philanthropic estimate of human 
life, that seeks for it in quantity and quality wher- 
ever found ; the philosophic impulse, that wishes to 
master causes, and through them effects, all these 
lie between the beginning and the end of history, 
between the period in which the human mind takes 
pleasure in dream-land, cloud-land only, and that 
in which it strives to repeat the glowing dyes of 
fancy in the sombre fields of its daily experience, 
setting more store by the simple flowers at its feet 
than by the crimson banks of color that come and 
go as transient shore-lines of flitting vapor. 

Gibbon claims especial attention, because his 
work made so sudden and decided an advance in 
history. It is possessed by the critical spirit, deals 
constantly with causes, and presents a style quite 
in keeping with the formal rhetorical tendency of 
his time. The very objection which has been taken 
to him, that he over-estimates the natural agencies 
connected with the propagation of Christianity, and 
under-estimates, or altogether overlooks, the super- 
natural ones, indicates an excellence in his method, 
while it discloses the unsympathetic and somewhat 
barren nature with which he performed his too 
purely intellectual work. Neither he, nor the spirit 



I96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

of the times which he expressed, was aglow with 
conviction, nor alive to the hopes and fears of life, 
its emotional issues near at hand and far off. Gib- 
bon presents in a cold, it is true, yet in a clear, 
striking and valuable form some of the best results 
of the new critical tendency in the then fresh de- 
partment of history. 

Another branch of literature, that of oratory, 
reached remarkable excellence in this last half of the 
century. Chatham, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Erskine, 
Pitt, Grattan form a group not since equalled. 
The greatest of these, Burke, well presents in his 
personal history the influences which attended on 
and secured this growth of eloquence. Bold politi- 
cal criticism, new political principles, and wakeful in- 
dependent sympathies, furnished the conditions and 
grounds of his oratory. A period that is fresh and 
vigorous in thought, exacting in style, and aroused 
by urgent, practical, yet national interests, gives 
the best possible conditions of eloquence. The 
years under consideration were of this character. 
Its critical spirit was at once formal and substan- 
tial, rhetorical and philosophical, brilliant in state- 
ment and bold in speculation. Weighty political 
interests, no longer amenable to laws of conquest 
or of violence, gave occasion for the enunciation of 
new principles in the government of colonies that 
had suddenly grown into national strength in the 
progress of English commerce. Allied to this ora- 
tory, were the Letters of Junius, which carried po- 
litical criticism to the height of boldness, force and 
severity. 



THE NOVEL. I97 

As was to be expected, rhetoric and criticism as 
arts began to receive some of their best contribu- 
tions. The works of Campbell, Karnes, Blair, have 
been for a century manuals in this department. 
Blair, though light in calibre, copious and some- 
what superficial, has by his simplicity, clearness 
and correctness held his ground against many mod- 
ern writers. He well presents in precept those 
formal excellencies of style of which he found such 
ample illustration in Temple, Addison, Atterbury. 

We urge this unusual productiveness of the 
period in prose at only one more point, the novel. 
From a merely literary, artistic view, the novels of 
this era, when we consider their number, variety 
and merit, constitute its most interesting, as they 
do its freshest feature. The novel is the last stage 
of prose in its progress toward poetry, and the first 
field that offers congenial cultivation as an author 
declines from verse. The novel of this period was 
reached in both ways. Sterne, Smollett, De Foe 
climbed up to this art-level from humbler labor; 
Fielding turned back to it from dramatic poetry. 
That the barometrical column should have rested in 
literature at this point, unable to rise permanently 
above it, shows how rare and light the intellectual 
atmosphere had become by continuous criticism, 
and that it was waiting to be toned again to its usu- 
al tonic force and productive power by a revolution, 
a storm of sentiment, seeking the conditions of new 
and higher order in freedom, and in living, spiritual 
convictions. 

De Foe possessed the measure of genius which 



I90 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

attaches to thorough realization. He sought and 
attained the minute truthfulness, the vera similitude 
of the pre-Raphaelite art. But as this perfect mas- 
tery of details was animated and directed by no un- 
usual insight into forces, nor knowledge of principles, 
he only reached, as in Robinson Crusoe, the level 
of an excellent story, an object-book, the delight of 
boys. Richardson adopted the most cumbersome 
form of story-telling, that of letters. This method, 
in its tedious indirection, is to the novel what dialogue 
is to philosophical discussion, a piece of mechanism 
fitted to check the thought, iron it thin, and deliver 
it in the largest number of sheets. Richardson's 
patient assiduity was at one with his chosen method. 
By minute invention and almost insensible accre- 
tion, he worked up his plots, entangling his charac- 
ters in a net not the less severe in its constraint, 
nor tragical in the issues involved because of the 
thousand gossamer threads of which the insect in- 
genuity of the author had spun it. Aiming directly 
as he did, at moral influence, it yet may well be 
doubted whether the sensual passions which he 
chose to delineate will admit to advantage of this 
slow, anatomical exposure. 

Fielding is every way different. His narrative 
is easy, his characters genuine and spirited. Moral- 
ity is not with him a law, and his scenes and heroes 
are often vicious and vulgar. Yet a certain nobility, 
generosity or sincerity of nature goes far to redeem 
those whom the author likes ; while opposite vices 
stamp with legible censure his real reprobates. 
Truth to English nature and sympathy with manly 



THE NOVELISTS. 199 

quality, perform in Fielding, to a degree, the work 
of morality. 

Smollett is much less worthy of commendation. 
He tells a story, not with the zest of insight and a 
loving appreciation of character, but as men re- 
hearse in bar-rooms tales made up of grotesque and 
gross incidents, and coarse physical jests. He 
generally gathers his material from a low region, 
and has little disposition to shake it clean in the 
getting. The English novel has hardly touched a 
lower point than in Smollett. The prying, sensual 
inuendo of Sterne, alive to mischief, is yet redeemed 
by greater humor. Such was the industry of prose 
composition in this period, opening all the veins of 
thought that have since been so assiduously wrought. 

The second fact to which we were to revert was 
the rule of Johnson. There is nothing quite like it 
in our literature. The great minds of our English 
race had come and gone, but none of them had held 
such absolute authority. Nor was this due to any 
inferiority of power in the literary cotemporaries of 
Johnson. No cluster of names in any one period 
brings before us greater or more varied talent, than 
those of Reynolds, Burke, Fox, Goldsmith, Garrick, 
Gibbon, Sheridan, Adam Smith, and Warton. We 
may be sure that it was no easy, indolent supremacy 
which such men as these yielded to Johnson. 

A singular instance of the deference paid him 
appears in the round-robin addressed him by Burke, 
Gibbon, Sheridan, and others requesting a slight 
modification of the epitaph he had written on Gold- 
smith. If there was some intentional humor in this 



200 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

method of appeal to the literary leader, making the 
thunderbolt of his wrath harmless by the circle of 
points that drew off and dissipated its impatient 
fire, there was also in it a sincere regard, and an 
unwillingness, on the part of these men, each great 
in his own way, singly to injure his feelings, or 
provoke his resentment. Johnson, in his later 
years, held a quiet, undisputed supremacy. This 
was due, as we have intimated, in its first ground, 
to the fact that the period, as one of criticism, pre- 
pared the way for immediate and personal control 
on the part of any one pre-eminent in this art ; and, 
in its second ground, to the character of Johnson. 

Sound intellectual qualities, common sense, 
continuous and protracted composition, led him to 
criticism, and, in spite of his dictatorial tendencies, 
kept his conclusions within safe and acceptable 
limits ; vigorous thought sustained what he wrote 
and said. While this is true, he was greatly defi- 
cient in that profound, philosophic spirit, in that 
unbiassed opinion, that calm, ready candor and deli- 
cate sympathy which deepen, while they moderate, 
the mind's action. His was the attitude of the con- 
troversialist, who sees clearly on his own side, feels 
to the full all the prejudices that sustain him, and 
is conveniently blind to the positions of an adver- 
sary. He was acute and analytic rather than pro- 
found and comprehensive. His powers were thor- 
oughly disciplined in spirited, personal intercourse, 
and the free methods of conversation. He used 
arguments as weapons, now of defence, now of 
offence, with very little quiet, thorough investiga- 



JOHNSON. 201 

tion of the whole subject. Like a professional sol- 
dier, he took up arms and laid them down again 
without primary reference to the justice of the cause. 
His own opinions, such as had fallen to him with 
an honest, but strongly biassed nature, were the 
ground which he set himself to defend in sturdy, 
English fashion. He could enjoy victory, and suffer 
keenly under defeat. Goldsmith said of him, " There 
is no getting along with Johnson, if his pistol misses 
fire, he knocks you down with the butt of it." Yet 
even then he knew how to give either the force of 
wit or the color of truth to the blow. Burke 
affirmed of him, that " Whatever side he advocated, 
he gave good reasons." Clear-minded men are of 
all persons most sophistical when they choose to 
be; most easily convince themselves and others 
of the justness of what they propose. 

To this keen rather than clear insight ; to this 
wilful rather than firm bent of mind, Johnson added 
in conversation quick, dexterous, unsparing wit. 
This rendered him a formidable adversary. It gave 
a precision to his* blows that made them instantly 
effective. He rebukes in this wise the timidity of 
Bolingbroke, who would not allow the publication 
of his works till after his death: "Sir, he was a 
scoundrel and a coward, a scoundrel for charging a 
blunderbuss against religion and morality ; a cow- 
ard because he had not resolution to fire it off him- 
self, but left a half-crown to a beggarly Scotchman 
to draw the trigger after his death." Miss Hannah 
More expressed to him surprise that a poet, who 
had written Paradise Lost, should compose such 
9* 



202 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

poor sonnets. He silences the critic without the 
labor of vindicating the maligned poems, without 
perhaps himself appreciating them. " Milton, mad- 
am, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from 
a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry- 
stones." 

If we add to these qualities the reputation which 
attached to him from his diversified, protracted and 
successful literary labors, and the evidence he 
always gave of an honest, upright and even tender 
nature, we see sufficient personal grounds for his 
influence. This massiveness and soundness of 
mind and heart were not to be hidden by a little 
irritability of temper, nor grossness of appetite, nor 
coarseness of taste. That he could command devo- 
ted and disinterested affection is seen in Boswell. 
The unmeasured contempt that Macaulay has ex- 
pressed for the friend and biographer of Johnson is 
not altogether deserved. There is a sincerity of 
admiration, and a forgetfulness of personal claims 
in Boswell, which call for some lenity. If he had 
possessed more pride, and a more irritable egotism, 
he would doubtless have escaped the scorn which 
has been so freely bestowed upon him, but he 
would also have lost the pleasure, of much profitable 
intercourse, and we a most enjoyable narrative. 
Let us be content with our own nettlesome inde- 
pendence, and not deride the assiduity of one who 
could profit by the virtues of a rare good man even 
in submission to his petty faults. As long as we 
concede so much to the duplicity and intrigue of 
ambition, to complaisance that is prompted by - 



JOHNSON. 203 

terest, we may grant something to the vanity and 
adulation of an unequal friendship. 

The control which Johnson exercised especially 
concerns us as expressing the critical character and 
appreciation of the period. There is much to be 
commended in Johnson as a critic; his common 
sense and breadth of intellectual activity stood him 
in good stead. Yet there is in him a lack of emo- 
tional insight, and a tendency to seek everywhere 
formal excellence rather than inherent power. This 
is seen in his unqualified acceptance of Pope and 
Dryden, and his evident relish of their art. In his 
Lives of the Poets, he gives the famous verses of 
Denham addressed to the Thames, 

" O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream 
My great example, as it is my theme ! 
Though deep, yet clear ; though gentle, yet not dull ; 
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." 

And adds, that " Since Dryden has commended 
them, almost every writer for a century has imitated 
them." After a slight criticism he proceeds to say, 
"The passage, however celebrated, has not been 
praised above its merit." The thought and imagery 
of these verses doubtless constitute them a neat 
piece of poetic work, but not one fitted to be the 
text of a century, and the model of a school. So 
used they could hardly fail to tether the fancy. 
They compare but poorly, we think, with the kin- 
dred lines of Wordsworth : 

" O, glide fair stream ! forever so 
Thy quiet soul on all bestowing, 
Till all our minds forever flow 
As thy deep waters now are flowing." 



204 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

In the same spirit he echoes Pope's praise of 
Dryden : 

'• WaTer was snu oth ; but Dry den taught to join 
The varying verse, the full resounding line, 
The long maiestick march, and energy divine." 

This in spirit and form is as brim-full of sound 
as the march of boys to drum and fife. With feel- 
ings akin to those which led to this commendation 
of Pope's, Johnson accepts under protest the 
blank-verse of Milton, "verse only to the eye," as 
an ingenious critic had pronounced it. He prefers 
the heroic, rhymed measure to which so much of 
our English poetry has timed its dreary, methodical 
march, as soldiers that plod wearily through a 
dull day. 

It was this opinion, with kindred faults in his 
estimate of Milton, which led Cowper in his Letters 
to say, "As a poet Johnson has treated Milton with 
severity enough, and has plucked one or two of the 
most beautiful feathers out of his Muse's wings, and 
trampled them under his great foot. I am con- 
vinced that he has no ear for poetical numbers, or 
that it was stopped by prejudice against the har- 
mony of Milton's. Was there ever anything so de- 
lightful as the music of Paradise Lost ? It is like 
that of a fine organ, has the fullest and deepest 
tones of majesty, with all the softness and elegance 
of a Dorian lute — variety without end, and never 
equalled. Yet the doctor has little or nothing to 
say upon this copious ;heme, but talks something 
about the unfitness of the English language for 
blank-verse, and how apt it is, in the mouths of 



JOHNSON. 205 

some readers, to degenerate into declamation. Oh, 
I could thresh his old jacket, till I made his pen- 
sion jingle in his pocket !" * Doubtless, yet the 
doctor so attacked, with unmollified temper and 
fresh sagacity, would have broadened his principles 
of criticism, and, in doughty championship, stamped 
hard the grounds of debate without once surrender- 
ing them. His definition of genius, given in the 
life of Cowley ; and of poetry, in his Preface to 
Shakespeare, both exhibit the same preponderance 
of intellectual, formal action over intuitive, spon- 
taneous power. " The true genius," he says, " is a 
mind of large general power, accidentally deter- 
mined to some particular direction." What is here 
assigned to accident is rather the very essence of 
genius. * The irrepressible impulse betrays the 
force that predetermines it, the genius that con- 
trols it. His is a definition of talent, not of genius ; 
and the men of this artistic age were men of talent 
rather than of genius. 

" The end of writing," says Johnson, " is to in- 
struct ; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleas- 
ing." Exactly, Pope would have said ; hardly, 
Shakespeare would have replied. Under this defi- 
nition he proceeds to criticise the great dramatist 
in this wise : " He sacrifices virtue to convenience, 
and is so much more careful to please than to in- 
struct, that he seems to write without any moral 
purpose. * * His precepts and axioms drop 
casually from him; he makes no just distribution 
of good or evil, nor is always careful to show in the 

* Reed's British Poets, vol. ii. p. 18. 



206 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked." If John- 
son had censured Shakespeare as wanting a hearty- 
appreciation of virtue, a sufficiently deep insight 
into it, and noble sympathy with it, his criticism 
would have had some hold ; but certainly the poet 
can be excused for not making over, in the way 
here commended, his dramas to didactic morality. 

Johnson puts in a personal shape, and lends 
personal force, to the great feature of his period. 
He is in intimate action and reaction with it. The 
life about him serves to explain much that is in 
him ; yet he, by his individual vigor, gives an ulti- 
mate element to it also. It is thus always. Men 
are not ciphers, in search of some integer of the 
physical world to give them value. They them- 
selves are a final law to much that is around them. 
What proportions of heat and cold, of wet and dry 
agents, were able to give, then and there, to Eng- 
lish society, the positive character known as John- 
son ? A solid Doric column, chipped into outline 
and assigned position by circumstances, he never- 
theless chiefly interests us by the rugged strength 
of his own native texture. 

Hawthorne thus speaks of him : "I was but 
little interested in the legends of the remote an- 
tiquity of Lichfield, being drawn here partly to see 
its beautiful cathedral, and still more, I believe, be- 
cause it was the birthplace of Dr. Johnson, with 
whose sturdy English character I became acquaint- 
ed at a very early period of my life, through the, 
good offices of Mr. Boswell. In truth, he seems as 
familiar to my recollection, and almost as vivid in 



JOHNSON. 207 

his personal aspect to my mind's eye, as the kindly 
figure of my own grandfather. * * Beyond all 
question I might have had a wiser friend than he. 
The atmosphere in which alone he breathed was 
dense ; his awful dread of death showed how much 
muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of him, 
before he could be capable of spiritual existence ; 
he meddled only with the surface of life, and never 
cared to penetrate farther than to plough-share 
depth ; his very sense and sagacity were but a 
one-eyed clear-sightedness. I laughed at him 
sometimes, standing beside his knee. And yet, 
considering that my native propensities were to- 
ward Fairy Land, and also how much yeast is gen- 
erally mixed up with the mental sustenance of a 
New Englander, it may not have been altogether 
amiss, in those childish and boyish days, to keep 
pace with this heavy-footed traveller, and feed on 
the gross diet that he carried in his knapsack. It 
is wholesome food even now. And then how Eng- 
lish ! Many of the latent sympathies that enabled 
me to enjoy the Old Country so well, and that so 
readily amalgamated themselves with the Ameri- 
can ideas that seemed the most adverse to them, 
may have been derived from, or fostered and kept 
alive by, the great English moralist. Never was a 
descriptive epithet more nicely appropriate than 
that ! Dr. Johnson's morality was as English an 
article as a beefsteak." * 

This English character of his was after ail his 
chief excellence. Though it could not, under a 

* " Our Old Home," p. 142. 



208 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

spiritual exigency, blossom into flowers, like Aaron's 
rod, it nevertheless could and did bring many a 
sturdy buffet to the back of fools. One who so em- 
bodies national traits as did Johnson those of the 
English tends strongly to confirm them. He pre- 
sents them in their most effective and brilliant form, 
one in which they best win the sympathy and com- 
mand the respect of the nation. Though the faults 
of such an one are as salient as his virtues, the 
glamour of the latter disguise the former, and cause 
them, in their milder aspects, to pass for piquant 
eccentricities. The force, therefore, with which a 
nation realizes itself in a man like Johnson makes 
him a new and vigorous agent in its history. 



LECTURE IX. 

A statement of the periods of English Literature, and of their rela- 
tions to each other. 

Second transition period. — Churchill, Akenside, Thomson, Gold- 
smith, Gray, Collins, Cowper, Burns. — Forces at work to pro- 
duce a new era, (a) Revival of early English Poetry, Percy's 
Reliques, Warton's History of English Poetry, (Z>) German In- 
fluence, Relations of France, Germany and England, (c) Political 
and Social Questions, (d) Philosophy and Religion, — Skepticism. 

We have now advanced sufficiently far in Eng- 
lish Literature to point out completely and finally 
the dependence on each other of its several periods, 
as we divide and designate them. Aside from the 
individual, the national and the foreign influences 
at work in them, we draw attention to their natural 
sequence, as indicating a connection which went 
far to determine their character, and more particu- 
larly that of later ones. The first or initiative 
period was arrested by the retrogressive one, and 
literature made a second start in the first creative 
period, that of Elizabeth. This, by an easy, natural 
transition, passed into the first critical period, the 
so called Augustan age of Pope and Johnson. This 
again, with a more obscure transition closing the 
eighteenth century, gave place to a second creative 
period, the opening years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, the years of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Words- 
worth. This has been followed by our own times, 

(209) 



210 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

an age more marked by diffusion, the volume and 
variety of literature, than by any one pre-eminent 
quality of it. Indeed its quality is largely deter- 
mined by this very fact of its universal circulation ; 
that, for the first time, literature is percolating down 
through all classes, and seeking to quicken them all. 
We shall strive later to show how this diffusion has 
been occasioned. We now refer only to the order 
of sequence between the three great eras, the de- 
terminative epochs, of our literary art, the first cre- 
ative period, the first critical, and the second cre- 
ative, each separated from the other by years of 
transition. Our own age is in turn, doubtless, one 
of transfer, though the diffusive powers of modern 
civilization have come in to impress upon it its most 
salient features. 

The first of these three periods being given, it 
tended to draw after it the other two in order ; as 
the wave heaped up before the wind furrows the sea 
behind it, and is then followed by a second. We can- 
not expect a creative era to last long. The forces 
at work too much transcend ordinary experience. 
The clustering in of influences and the sudden un- 
folding of national genius under them are as neces- 
sarily transient as fruit to the plant, or summer to 
the seasons. When, however, these forces begin to 
abate, they do not subside at once. Though none 
are able to open up in art new directions, or quite 
equal its masters in old ones, there are many who 
can catch something of the spirit abroad, and who 
are able, in various ways, to perfect the movement 
already initiated. The products of art that were 



DEPENDENCE OF ART ON CREATION. 211 

secured while the inventive power, in its first in- 
tensity, was at work in the national mind, now on 
its partial decline, give both the occasion and the 
principles of criticism. The busy workmen cease 
indeed to quarry the living rock, but they chisel dili- 
gently at the Titanic blocks already lifted from their 
bed. In architecture no sooner has the new style 
struck its initial idea, found a master under it, and 
been pushed to a magnificent realization, than many 
come in to modify, mingle, manipulate ; uniting the 
new to the old, exhausting the new in its manifold 
applications. 

Genius can scarcely discern all that is in it, or 
stop to unfold it. Talent .can hardly fail to take up 
with critical delight this unfinished work, flattered 
at once by laboring with the masters of art, and 
seeming to improve upon them. Genius gives 
occasions, suggestions to talent ; and talent patron- 
izes genius, while really doing its servile work. 
Criticism follows invention, completes it, and makes 
its gains permanent in rules and principles. It pre- 
pares the national taste, in its moderated, habitual 
action, fully to appreciate and relish great works. 
It enters analytically into the good achieved, and 
makes way ultimately for its more thorough appre- 
ciation. 

But art easily forgets and oversteps these its 
natural limits. As it is liable to mistake, in the 
very outset, the power to criticise and improve for 
superiority, so is it afterward inclined to delight in 
rules and lines of order, aside from any complete- 
ness or fulness of life expressed by them. Criti- 



212 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

cism at the beginning, true criticism, is very de- 
lightful. It is passing beneath the form to the force 
which controls it, and seeing the two in their inter- 
dependence. But when the fatal excess that is in 
it overtakes it ; when it dreams that because the 
form expresses the force, the force may be reached 
through the form, it passes rapidly into superficiality 
and coldness, wearying at length its most devoted 
disciples. Thus in the art referred to, architecture, 
the expansion of a style is almost sure to lead to 
degeneration, to the excesses of a profligate, ill- 
governed fancy, and thus to be brought to an un- 
timely end. 

But when the harvest of invention has been 
gathered, and the rich field exhaustively gleaned by 
criticism, there must needs be a second seed-time. 
None can say how long the winter of discontent 
that follows the barrenness of mere criticism will 
last, but it must be brought to a close by a second 
creative period, a vigorous, independent reaction in 
some direction. The new period is provoked by 
the manifest call for it, by the disrelish and ennui 
of the hour ; and sooner or later national forces, if 
vigorous, will respond to this claim upon them. 

Thus the three periods which interlock the 
other periods of English literature, and disclose the 
inter-dependence of its history, succeeded each 
other. Shakespeare initiated the movement, Pope 
refined upon it, Wordsworth rebelled against the 
excesses of criticism, and returned anew to nature. 
Creation led to art, and art, having faithfully spun its 
last silken thread, lay a dead crysalis, till a new life 



THE SECOND TRANSITION. 213 

was ready to eat asunder its sepulchral cerements, 
and betake itself again to the air. 

In the present lecture, we are to deal with a 
second transition, to trace, in individual poets of the 
closing half of the eighteenth century, the changes 
by which poetry finally passed from the school of 
Pope to the freedom indicated by Wordsworth. It 
was an unpoetical period, the critical tendency was 
very slowly expending itself, and giving place to 
new impulses ; so slowly that for sixty years there 
was no poet of the first rank, scarcely one undenia- 
bly of the second rank. Churchill, so popular in 
his own day, so nearly forgotten in ours ; a rival 
then in fame to Dryden and Pope, now known 
chiefly by name, seems to have carried to its last 
and most superficial form the rhetorical, satirical 
phase of poetry. Akenside, didactic in matter, 
stiffly classical in manner, with a coldly poetic eleva- 
tion of diction, was not fitted to help his age onward 
either in freedom, depth or boldness. When a poet 
gives himself to an analytic rehearsal and eulogy of 
the pleasures of the imagination, we may be pretty 
sure that his poems proceed neither from the bold, 
battling flights of phantasy, nor from the loving, 
cooing frenzy with which it feeds and nestles its 
callow young. The mood of mind in which we 
write about the passions is not that in which we 
most strongly feel them. 

Thomson presents one element of progress, a 
glowing and fairly faithful description of natural 
beauties. Of this inspiration he seems to have 
drunk much deeper than his predecessors. If he 



214 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

had added to this love of nature equally earnest hu- 
man sympathies, and could have given these the 
bent of a creative purpose, he would have possessed 
the endowments of a great poet. As it was, his 
power was too unsupported and single to yield 
large results. He justifies his chosen subjects to 
himself, and gives them an apologetic introduction 
to his readers, in a formal appeal to the ruling 
poetic taste. 

" Such themes as these the rural Maro sung 
To wide imperial Rome, in the full height 
Of elegance and taste, by Greece refined." * 

He is thus reassured, since Greeks and Romans 
had done the like, that it is safe, poetically and con- 
ventionally safe, for an Englishman to sing of 
"fostering breezes," "softening dews," and "tender 
showers." So cold an enthusiasm and fearful a 
search for precedents might well be followed by a 
feeble dressing up of homely things in poetic ver- 
biage, like the following : 

" Hushed in short suspense, 
The plumy people streak their wings with oil, 
To throw the lucid moisture trickling off." f 

Or this : 

" Urged to the giddy brink, much is the toil, 
The clamour much, of men and boys and dogs, 
Ere the soft fearful people to the flood 
Commit their woolly sides. " X 

When we can wash sheep in a way no more 
straightforward than this, our muse is too dainty 
for husbandry. 

* Spring. f Ibid. X Summer. 



THOMSON. 215 

Observe the coldness of the following personifi- 
cations : 

" Half in a blush of clustering roses lost, 
Dew dropping Coolness to the shade retires; 
There, on the verdant turf, or flowery bed, 
By gelid founts and careless rills to muse : 
While tyrant Heat, dispreading through the sky, 
With rapid sway, his burning influence darts 
On man and beast and herb and tepid stream." * 

Such abstractions as coolness and heat are here 
personified without the slightest descriptive clue by 
which the imagination can give them a bodily form ; 
or rather any form which the fancy may assign 
them springs up instantly to contradict and make 
absurd their nature and functions. Imagery that is 
present as comprehension is absent, and steals 
away on its approach, is at war with any complete- 
ness of thought. Thomson, though in vassalage. 
to his times, is in part saved from them by the 
dreamy sympathy of his nature with the physical 
world about him. He has this one point of living 
contact and hence of freedom and power. So far 
we stand indebted to him. 

There was in Goldsmith no such force or inde- 
pendence of intellectual character as to free him 
from current impressions, or lead him to new re- 
sults. There was, however, in his Irish heart a 
tenderness and a profusion of sympathies that take 
from his poems all coldness, and lift them above the 
school to which they belong. His personal and his 
poetic merits both rest on the same emotional basis. 

Perhaps no one poem is a higher, a more suc- 

* Summer. 



2l6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

cessful expression of the type of poetry under dis- 
cussion than Gray's Elegy. We would rank it with 
the productions of the critical school, not because 
of the date of its composition, but because it owes 
so much of its excellence to the exactness and easy 
elegance of its form. With no peculiar depth of 
insight, or vigor of imagination, it confers unfailing 
pleasure, by its naturalness of sentiment, its sim- 
plicity and aptness of expression. In the highest 
work, adverse tendencies always meet ; form and 
substance concur. Hence any unusual strength in 
either element is sure to bring with it fair power 
in the other. While there is this unity of qualities 
in the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, its 
predominant excellence seems to us to lie in the 
studied simplicity and exactness of expression, in the 
easy precision with which the sentiment assumes the 
imagery, and both, the metre and rhyme, gliding on 
with them the clearest and most peaceful of streams. 
In Collins we meet with a poet of a much bolder 
spirit. His own time no more accepted him than 
he it. His poems were received with almost com- 
plete neglect, and rose to rank slowly by their own 
buoyancy. There belong to Collins a new intensity 
of emotion, a vividness of personification, a broader 
sweep of imagination, which decidedly distinguish 
his composition from that of his cotemporaries, and 
impart to the reader a sense of larger, freer, glad- 
der motion. As a vigorous bird proportions his 
curves of flight to his power of muscle, so Collins 
adopts a more varied and continuous rhythm. His 
successive' impulses gather up and weave together 



COLLINS. 217 

more lines, and we are borne on the strong wing of 
a single image through a series of varying melodies, 
that will not fall apart into brief, measured stanzas. 
This is observable in the opening of his Ode to 
Liberty; also in his Ode to the Passions : 

" Who shall awake the Spartan fife, 
And call in solemn sounds to life, 
The youths, whose looks divinely spreading, 
Like vernal hyacinths in sullen hue, 
At once the breath of fear and virtue shedding, 
Applauding Freedom, loved of old to view ? 
AVhat new Alcaeus, fancy-blest, 
Shall sing the sword, in myrtles drest, 
At wisdom's shrine awhile its flame concealing, 
(What place so fit to seal a deed renown'd ?) 
Till she her brightest lightnings round revealing, 
Itleap'd in glory forth, and dealt her prompted wound." 

This fearless and impassioned movement of Collins 
put him out of sympathy with the tame, restricted 
temper about him. He had anticipated the season, 
and must needs wait the approach of coming sum- 
mer months. 

We now pass farther on in the century, and meet 
with two poets quite divorced from the old, and, in 
very different ways, ready to usher in the new, 
Cowper and Burns. The connection of Cowper 
with the approaching and better spirit of poetry is 
quite generally recognized. Says Craik: "As the 
death of Johnson closes one era of our literature, so 
the appearance of Cowper as a poet opens another. 
* * . His opinions were not more his own than 
his manner of expressing them. His principles of 
diction and versification were announced, in part, in 
the poem in which he introduced himself to the 



2l8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

public, his Table-Talk, in which, having intimated 
his contempt for the 'creamy smoothness' of modern 
fashionable verse, where sentiment was so often 

" ' Sacrificed to sound, 
And truth cut short to make the period round,' 

"he exclaims, 

" ' Give me the line that ploughs its stately course, 
Like a proud swan, conquering the stream by force : 
That, like some cottage beauty, strikes the heart, 
Quite unindebte-d to the tricks of art.' " * 

Cowper recognized the formality and rigidity 
into which literature had fallen under the influence 
of Pope, and complains of him that he has 

" Made poetry a mere mechanic art, 
And every warbler has his tune by heart." 

This independent criticism shows that he caught 
sight of a new era, and designedly hastened its 
coming. To the last degree timid and self-distrust- 
ful, his mind nevertheless moved independently 
and vigorously under its own laws. This inner 
strength and courage of the soul, are quite distinct 
from confidence in action, and are often met with 
without it. Indeed the timidity with which such a 
mind retires upon itself leaves it. only the more free 
to follow its own bent. It was the seclusion of a 
diffident nature that hemmed Cowper about, and 
left him to his own independent judgment. 

The fresh impulse which Cowper brought to 
poetry is found in the genuineness, depth, and per- 
vasive character of his sentiments. While his 

* English Literature and Language, vol. ii. p. 372. 



COWPER. 219 

poems have in them much that might be thought 
didactic, this matter is given in so natural, reflect- 
ive, and yet more, in so emotional, a manner as 
quite to escape the censure that might be implied 
in the word. The thought does not, predetermined, 
so much seek for the image and rhythm wherewith 
to enforce itself, as flow out in an incidental living 
way from the scenes and objects present to the 
poetic imagination. It is not thought, but its cold 
statement, or perceptive enforcement, that poetry 
rejects. Cowper has a large measure of that power 
which brings interpretation to natural objects, and 
looks upon them with a rapid interplay of sugges- 
tions, uniting the visible to the invisible, and lend- 
ing to passing events a scope otherwise quite be- 
yond them. Especially is he able, in the manner 
of Wordsworth, to see and feel the twining and in- 
tertwining of facts and sentiments, which often so 
closely bind the buoyant spiritual mind to the phys- 
ical world, and make this the resounding loom in 
which are woven with wonderful rapidity, variety, 
and beauty the patterns of its highest and noblest 
thoughts. The quiet, earnest, subtile, pure, perva- 
sive mind of Cowper made him a poet by the innate 
force and character of its conceptions. There is 
everything in his history to confirm the view, that art 
finds its germ in natural endowment, and nothing 
to sustain the theory, that it can be compassed by 
external conditions. Attached to one of the least 
interesting portions of England, he was yet pre-em- 
inent in his love of nature, and penetrating obser- 
vation of it ; in close intercourse with the devotees 



220 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

of Calvinism, his poetry is marked by sympathy 
and tenderness of sentiment ; diffident and distrust- 
ful beyond self-control, his verse moves, as he fain 
would have it, with the quiet force of a swan breast- 
ing the stream, seeking and, to the full, enjoying 
its own. 

The devoutness of Cowper was too deep, di- 
rectly, formally to control his poems. It and they 
grew together out of his entire intellectual and 
emotional life. Religious sentiment and spiritual 
insight gave the same strong traits to his produc- 
tions that they imparted to his character. Without 
these he would have been another man and another 
poet. Though his religious views received a severe 
and melancholy cast, which, concurring with natural 
temperament, led him at times within the limits of 
insanity, this spiritual vitality was not less the nor- 
mal disposition of the man ; and was connected 
with a volatile temper deeply impressible by mirth 
and the quiet joys of life. Though his nature made 
answer most fully to religious sentiment, it was with 
no loss of the attachments which fall to a lively 
temperament. 

Burns imparted to poetry an impulse at once 
like that given by Cowper and diverse from it. 
Both were in a high degree natural, spontane- 
ous, sincere; but the sincerity of the one was 
that of a melancholy and devout temper, and 
that of the other of a joyous and passionate one. 
Few characters so elicit sympathy and regard, 
passing into regret and sadness, as that of Burns. 
With large and generous impulses and an eager 



BURNS. 221 

relish for pleasure, he sought it impetuously, and 
missed it early and almost utterly. His warm, 
emotional nature made him as ready to impart 
as to receive enjoyment, yet his fatal haste and 
disobedience brought the same bitterness to 
others as to himself. His love was as deadly as 
the hate of another man. The flowers he planted 
lost their fragrance, and the blossoms he plucked 
distilled blood upon his fingers. We share some- 
thing of his resentment and impatience at the 
stern, cold, cruel features , of the social life and 
religious faith of his country, yet we are forced 
to remember, that out of his own more tender 
sentiments, as expressed in the Cottar's Saturday 
Night, there came no strength, no power to 
plant, to harvest, or to enjoy the good he cov- 
eted. His own failure was early and complete. 

As a lyric poet Burns deserves the name of 
great. In the most essential qualities of this 
form of verse ; in fire, tenderness and naturalness, 
none have surpassed him. The earnest devotion 
of Cowper united him in meditative sympathy to 
nature ; the warm passions of Burns set him 
aglow with human interests, and made him the 
poet of tender, heroic, mirthful, wilful impulses. 
He keenly felt, and uttered melodiously what 
he felt ; and by this force of a strong, impetuous 
nature became a fresh, creative poet, working vigor- 
ously for the new era. With lively and sympathetic 
feelings he entered into the homely experiences of 
life about him, both frolicsome and serious, gay and 
sombre ; rendered them with his own appreciation, 



222 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

and colored them with his own transfiguring fancy. 
The human sympathies of Burns wrought like the 
spiritual sympathies of Covvper, and put him, at 
times, as in the Mountain Daisy, in living con- 
cord with nature. 

The class to which Burns belonged, the dia- 
lect in which he wrote, his limited education, 
all lightened the weight of conventional influ- 
ences, and left him chiefly to the push of his 
own nature as he produced his lyrics, first for 
himself, and later for the world. Though Burns 
stands at the entrance of the new period, none 
of the great poets that followed surpassed him 
in individuality of faculties, a freedom which yet 
left him in full mastery of a varied and most 
melodious verse. Here again in the life of 
Burns we have a large, constitutional, original 
element, which shaped itself into the develop- 
ment of his times without being governed by it. 
Pope had been made the subject of admiring 
study by Burns, yet cast no reflection of him- 
self in the dancing, sparkling, rollicksome stream 
of his verse. 

We now turn, having touched a few of the 
significant features of transition in . the works of in- 
dividual poets, to the general forces which helped 
to bring about a new intellectual activity, a fresh 
era of invention. We have referred to the wea- 
riness into which art, mere art, finally falls, the 
ennui which forces the spirit to some new 
form of activity. But this is a negative rather 
than a positive force, a divorce from the past 



INTEREST IN EARLY ENGLISH POETRY. 223 

rather than a promise of the future. We still need 
to see what awakening energies, what living 
ideas, were then at large in the intellectual 
world, to take the guidance of a new movement, 
and impart to it impulse. 

A literary influence which accompanied and 
indicated this change of taste was an increased 
interest in early English poetry. The nation, weary 
of the products of classical criticism, turned to the 
fresh, wild fruits of its own literary youth, and 
sought in its early ballads the relish it had lost in 
didactic art ; as old age seeks to renew its lan- 
guid appetites with the fruits that delighted its 
boyhood. It is always a sign of health when a 
people is interested in itself, its history, its art, 
and the tendencies native to its growth. A 
submission to foreign law, and a sedulous imi- 
tation of works more or less alien to the soil 
and temper and wants of a people, are the 
marks of nagging invention, and the precursors 
of still farther decay. 

The publication, in 1765, of Percy's Reliques 
of Ancient English Poetry was a leading and very 
influential indication of the wakefulness of the 
nation to its own work. " I do not think," said 
Wordsworth, " that there is an able writer in verse 
of the present day, who would not be proud to 
acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques ; I 
know that it is so with my friends; for myself I 
am happy to make a public avowal of mine own." 
Walter Scott, who felt so pre-eminently, and who 
so fully followed out, this tendency to legendary 



224 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

and romantic history, to restored nationalism, says : 
" From this time," the date of his reading the 
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, " the love 
of natural beauty, more especially when com- 
bined with ancient ruins, or the remains of our 
fathers' piety or splendour, became with me an 
insatiable passion, which, if circumstances had 
permitted, I would willingly have gratified by 
travelling over half the globe." So ready and 
inflammable was the material prepared for these 
living coals, unraked from the ashes of departed 
years. The Reliques were largely composed of 
the lyrics of earlier and later writers. The bal- 
lads yielded the key-note, and then gave place to 
the melody of more modern verse, the most free 
and national in its character. Lyric poetry, less 
ambitious than other forms, more close to the 
individual sentiment, is wont to be the refuge of 
the most genuine, simple and passionate strains ; 
to be most deeply infused with the national temper. 
The impression made by this work of Percy's 
was confirmed by Warton's History of English 
Poetry. This history covers the early years of our 
literature broadly and thoroughly, and indicates at 
once enthusiasm and patient research. The awak- 
ened interest in the past is also indicated by the 
literary forgeries of the time. These sprang up 
in connection with the general interest that attend- 
ed on historical research. Evidently Macpherson 
and Chatterton found something in this eager tem- 
per of the public mind which prepared the way for 
their deceptions. 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 225 

A second literary element, which marked and 
helped to cause the shifting spirit of the period, was 
the incipient influence of German literature. Im- 
mediate entrance was given to it through Walter 
Scott, and still more, through Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge. Coleridge was well fitted for the reception 
both of its philosophy and poetry. His methods of 
thought concurred with his knowledge to render 
German influence powerful with him. From this 
date onward German literature has been gaining 
ground in England and America, and has for many 
years been quite the most vigorous of European 
forces. England, France and Germany, together 
supreme in philosophy, science and art, hold toward 
each other independent and diverse positions. The 
artistic element, in its more separate and complete 
form, belongs to France. The active, the brilliant, 
the formal, in social organization, in social inter- 
course, in criticism, in creation, are found with the 
French ; the sluggish, practical, powerful and use- 
ful rest with the English ; while to the German 
belongs the theoretical, the speculative, the pro- 
found, the laborious. The three occupy in refer- 
ence to each other the points of a triangle. For 
the English to draw near the French is to be quick- 
ened in execution, but to lose weight ; to be made 
critical, captious and superficial : for them to draw 
near the Germans is to deepen and enlarge inquiry ; 
is to be renewed in thought, and enlivened in in- 
vention. 

Taine reproaches the English as lacking philos- 
ophy. The reproach is not just, and, if it were, 



226 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

would come but poorly from a Frenchman. The 
philosophical tendency is not as controlling in Eng- 
land as it has been in Germany ; nor is it likely to 
flash out in as extreme, rapid, and perchance brilliant 
speculation as in France ; yet, as we shall later 
show, as settled, consistent, continuous and fruitful 
a philosophical movement has fallen to England as 
to either of the other two. The philosophy of Eng- 
land shows a history far more independent than 
does that of France, and one, we believe, whose 
results have kept much closer to the truth than the 
speculations of either France or Germany. 

It is now urged, and with a measure of correct- 
ness, that the scientific temper is one of relative 
indifference to the bearing of the results reached by 
inquiry ; that it schools itself to accept one result as 
freely as another. As against controlling preju- 
dice, this claim must be granted, not, we think, 
as against every cautious, constitutional tendency. 
The English, as contrasted with the Germans, pur- 
sue philosophy distrustfully, with a predisposed and 
interested spirit. Questions of religion, of society, 
and of government are so present to their specula- 
tions, that they are always forecasting the issues 
and tendencies of a theory, suffering practical exi- 
gencies to react upon it, and turning aside from 
troublesome conclusions. It may be questioned 
whether the fruits of their philosophy have for this 
reason been less valuable. Additional caution, re- 
peated consideration by various minds, a stern re- 
sistance to extreme, erratic tendencies, have been 
the result, and have made the gains of thought, if 



THE PRACTICAL TEST. 227 

slower, less bold and captivating, more safe and 
reliable. The German mind, from its intellectual 
freedom, from this very divorce of its speculative 
processes from practical questions, its separation 
from the interests of the hour, — for in Germany one's 
philosophy is especially disconnected from his so- 
cial, political and religious relations, — has lost some 
of the balance and steadiness which the retardation 
of immediate and material interests would have im- 
posed upon it. Moreover, the practical relations of 
a theory do afford a partial, even though it be an 
inadequate test of its correctness. The German 
mind, with all its subtlety, breadth of knowledge, 
and boldness of inquiry, seems not especially well 
fitted to weigh evidence, and to reach reliable con- 
clusions. A wild, dreamy speculation sweeps in 
upon it from this side, and is shortly followed by 
another as erratic from that side. It is impossible 
for any of us to preserve an ideal attitude of indiffer- 
ence to evidence, and to be prepared to weigh it ex- 
actly and completely as it is offered. If the thoughts 
were thus to loosen themselves, to drop the great 
burden of practical issues and previous conclusions 
that sober them, they would be seen to play fitfully, 
like idle weathercocks, rather than to mark deep 
undercurrents, like anchored buoys. The new as 
new, the fresh theory because it is the last theory, 
our thoughts as our own have a peculiar hold on the 
mind, and should be met by the inertia of old ten- 
dencies. An index that plays with some friction 
shows the stronger forces, and escapes the fluctua- 
tions of lighter ones. An Englishman can hardly 



228 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

be as extreme and visionary as it is possible for 
a German to be, and because he has more of this 
national habit of mind upon him, feels more of its 
conservative tendencies. Now t this inertia of a 
nation, putting to perpetual use its knowledge, does 
often embarrass philosophy, but often saves it also ; 
makes it stupid at times, it is true, but always ren- 
ders it serious, and faithful to whatever has been 
entrusted to it. 

The English, as contrasted with either Germans 
or Frenchmen, owe much to their political organiza- 
tion, to their compact, slowly developing, social and 
religious life, by which every question assumes a 
national bearing, and is kept at all hazards within 
the limits of safety. If much is due to the boldness 
of individual thought, much also is due to the slow, 
half-instinctive movement of a nation, as it creeps 
hesitatingly on in its organic development. This 
judgment of every theory by its power to play 
safely into the daily facts of life is a wholesome re- 
straint on erratic speculation, is allied in philosophy 
and religion, in the checks it affords, to those of- 
fered in science by the special phenomena under 
discussion. 

At this second creative period in her literary 
history, England began to come in contact with the 
freer, bolder, more speculative mind of Germany, and 
to be awakened by it. The English make awkward 
disciples of the French, as a slow practical person 
appears poorly in the presence of one audacious, 
quick-witted and accomplished. They unite more 
hopefully to the obscure, patient and intellectually 



CONTRASTS OF NATIONAL CHARACTER. 229 

productive Germans ; turning readily to an imme- 
diate purpose, and presenting on their valuable side, 
the fruits of these diligent laborers. The practical 
strikes hands advisedly with the theoretical, and is 
sure of the larger half of the common harvest. 
The ore that is brought to the mine's mouth is thus 
quickly reduced, and made marketable. 

In a characterization of nations, only a general 
and partial truth is aimed at, or can be reached. 
Individual exceptions will spring up on all sides. 
England, France, Germany, have each many citi- 
zens who share the national virtues, and in large 
measure escape the national faults. Certainly the 
individual never appears to better advantage than 
when, availing himself to the full of the nation's re- 
sources, he yet tempers them all to a broader and 
more catholic spirit ; the Englishman adding to his 
own firm-footedness the nimble celerity of the 
Frenchman, and the sustained strength of the Ger- 
man ; or the German enlivening his thoughtful path 
with the vivacity of French insight, and bending it 
to the sober, serious purposes of his Saxon kins- 
man ; or the Frenchman, casting the brilliancy of 
his national spirit over the solid substance in char- 
acter of the other two. It is also to be remembered, 
that national tendencies are always the most clearly 
shown in social, political and religious questions, 
and in philosophy and criticism as they bear upon 
these. In science the conditions of progress are 
more fixed and independent, and personal bias is 
less influential. All nations are more nearly one 
on those topics which pertain less immediately to 



23O THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

character. The order of European influence has 
been Italian, French, German ; and the long arm 
and strong hand now rest with Germany. 

This creative period was also profoundly affected 
by political causes. The movement toward religious 
liberty which had been so efficient a force in the 
Elizabethan period had at length, under favoring 
circumstances, issued in an equally decided and 
extended claim for political liberty. The religious 
precedents and drift of the past had not been more 
sharply questioned, nor its conclusions more broadly 
denied on general principles by the Protestant Ref- 
ormation, than were the opinions pertaining to so- 
ciety and government by the American Revolution. 
This revolution, while favored by circumstances, 
had not been their blind result. It had not been 
made ready by mere physical forces; with these 
there had been a steady ripening of opinions, a 
practical use and_ theoretical proclamation of the 
principles of political freedom. This revolution was 
not allowed, therefore, to transpire in the dark, its 
underlying truths obscured by the turmoil of con- 
flict, or lost sight of in the interests of the hour. It 
was ripened by convictions, and accompanied by 
the clearest announcement of its justifying reasons. 
Its social bearings were thus much more important 
than its immediate political ones. Though it was 
the starting point of .a great nation, it helped to set 
in motion, and gave a permanent, unmistakable 
form to social truths, which overleap all national 
bounds, and carry discussion and commotion every- 
where. 



RIGHTS. 231 

Questions of government and social organiza- 
tion have, from that hour to the present, been the 
themes of the most earnest, enlarged, varied and 
urgent consideration. The destiny of the leading 
civilized nations has been rescued, in part, from the 
blind flow of physical forces, from the awards of 
battle, and shaped by a conscious and ever return- 
ing struggle for enlarged rights, for social gains to 
be secured and fortified under new organizations. 

England was compelled to take a prominent 
part in the practical, passing solution of these prob- 
lems. True to her history, she was divided in sen- 
timent against herself, throwing her physical weight 
chiefly upon one side, and her moral weight largely 
upon the other. The American Revolution was 
followed by the French Revolution, in part begot- 
ten, and certainly hastened by it. The first kindled 
those latent tendencies which wildly flamed out in 
the second, on a broader field, in the midst of more 
valuable and critical interests, and with less of the 
restraint either of reason or surrounding circum- 
stances. Questions of rights thus received at once 
an emphasis which did not allow them to be set 
aside. Here again England was a leading belliger- 
ant, was driven by her sluggish, jealous and conser- 
vative temper into an extreme attitude of resistance, 
out of harmony, at least in the outset, with her 
own best sentiment, and finally covered up and 
made admissible only by the extravagance of the 
French, and that blind martial mania of theirs 
which slowly resolved the entire controversy into 
one of conquest. 



232 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

We can hardly in our country and in our time, 
when questions of government, and our rights 
under it, are in constant discussion, and are every 
day finding an easy and safe settlement, appre- 
ciate the shock which these inquiries brought at 
the beginning, before men had become accus- 
tomed to them, or society supple under them ; 
when they carried with them the imminent danger 
of such bloody crises, and half-fruitless struggles, 
as those of the French Revolution. 

In these political and social conflicts, the 
second brood of the Spirit of Liberty, we have a 
force fitted to stir the mind of England scarcely 
less deeply, and quite as broadly as those religious 
rights which called forth its earlier strength. The 
leading minds of the incoming period were borne 
rapidly forward by these incentives. Johnson re- 
sisted the progressive spirit. He personified the 
stubborn English temper, slow to acquire anything 
new, and yet slower to part with anything old ; 
that accepts with composure the revolutions of 
the past, but has no sympathy with those of the 
present. Burke, less timid, favored for a time 
revolution, and lost sympathy with it only in its 
excesses. 

Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, were carried 
away with the first enthusiasm of liberty, and 
slowly returned to a conservative temper as ex- 
perience, reflection, constitutional tendencies, or 
disastrous revolution restored to each the balance 
of thought. 

Shelley, Byron, Landor remained more extreme 



REVOLUTION. 233 

in temper. Shelley especially drank to intoxication 
of the glowing promises of speedy, social regene- 
ration. All the great minds of the period en- 
countered at once these questions of liberty, and 
were aroused to fresh activity, strange hopes, or 
sudden alarms by them. It is to be observed, 
however, that those somewhat secondary in ability 
were alone shaken from permanent composure ; 
while the larger minded and more sedate ones 
came slowly to receive the promises of revolu- 
tion with abatement, and to cling to the old, as 
at least presenting the soil out of which the 
new must grow, and by which it must be nour- 
ished. The slow organic revolution of society 
held the thoughts of those sobered by experi- 
ence, and taught the continuity of events, as 
against all violent and precipitate change. There 
is very little difficulty in society that is simply 
one of organization, and can be sufficiently 
met by constitutional shifts. The wise caught 
the lessons of the French convulsions before the 
revolutionary drama was half closed, while the 
enthusiastic were left to misunderstand events, 
to look wearily about for the reasons of failure 
when the last sad scene was over. 

In philosophy and theology, the influences 
at the close of the eighteenth century were vig- 
orous and progressive. Science was rapidly en- 
larging its acquisitions in all directions. The 
skepticism of Hume was calling forth a new 
school of Scotch metaphysicians. The critical, ma- 
terialistic, utilitarian tendency of English thought 



234 TH E PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

was meeting with farther enlargement by such vig- 
orous men as James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. 

Coleridge was a zealous party to these in- 
quiries, and gave ■ new emphasis to the truths 
of our higher, our intuitive nature. By his ex- 
tended influence, especially through the medium 
of conversation, he was able to carry these dis- 
cussions into literary circles, and quicken and 
deepen interest in the profound questions of 
our being. The practical religious life of the 
nation, strengthened by the zeal of many able 
and devout men, held the grounds of faith with 
stubborn resistance to the skeptical philosophy 
of the time, and with the changing methods of 
defense which the advance of inquiry made ne- 
cessary. Since the time of Locke there has been 
no material cessation in the conflicts in the Eng- 
lish mind between science, philosophy and religion. 
The later lines of struggle, however, those which 
rest back on the reason, the intuitive nature of 
man, were beginning to be more clearly taken, as 
this second creative period came forward ; and 
helped to enlarge and deepen its spiritual impulses. 

The conflict was also made more intense by 
a reflex wave of English philosophy returning to 
it through the French. The tendencies to ma- 
terialism latent in the doctrines of Locke had 
been more rapidly and fearlessly unfolded in 
France than in England, and had there taken 
their secondary form of religious unbelief and 
revolutionary social theories. The celerity and 
recklessness of the French mind enabled it to 



CONVERGING TENDENCIES. 235 

give back, as the startling infidelity of Voltaire, 
and the destructive socialism of Rousseau, what 
it received as a safe, quiet denial of innate ideas. 
So different do the same seeds of thought ripen 
in distinct national soils ! On this period were 
converging *the political revolutions which sprang 
from Puritanism, and those quickened by the fe- 
verish theories of French materialism. If the 
sober-minded were thrown forward by the one, 
they were quickly flung backward by the other. 
On this period were converging the tenacious, 
slowly-progressive theology of the English mind, 
its deep-seated, half-unconscious materialism, al- 
ways prone to shirk and deny its own corol- 
laries ; the abstruse theories of Germany, too re- 
mote to be to many either the grounds of be- 
lief or unbelief; and the extreme, startling and 
varied social and religious skepticism of the 
French, alarming the most tender and deep 
sympathies of the soul. It is not strange that 
many minds, so played upon, became erratic, 
and that retreat followed quick upon advance. 
Thus the century opened, a pregnant spring- 
time, in which the useful, the beautiful and the 
worthless struggled together for sun-light. 

Every quarter of the civilized world was 
coming to be subject to intense influences from 
every other. Assertions, which went forth as 
harmless speculations, came back as revolution- 
ary frenzy. Nothing was at rest, nothing un- 
assailable ; nor had men yet learned the value 
of revolution, the power and worth of a mere 



236 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

change of organization. The hopes of men were 
as extravagant as their thoughts were feverish, 
and they were ready in all directions, to make 
short roads to the millennium, and take by vio- 
lence the kingdom of heaven. On this religi- 
ious and political ferment the century opened, 
and set itself to the task of eliminating its false- 
hoods and embodying its truths. 

The interlacing of different tendencies, the 
striking modifications which national and indi- 
vidual character brought to the same fundamen- 
tal principles, are seen in the social, political 
philosophy of Locke as expanded in England, 
in America, in France ; and also in the posi- 
tion of free, protestant Holland, sheltering in 
the ^seventeenth century the Puritans of Eng- 
land, and in the eighteenth the skeptics of 
France ; giving its types, now to an English 
Bible, now to the Social Contract of Rousseau; 
and becoming at length the "great printing press 
of France." • It fell to this century to decide 
between nation and nation, statement and state- 
ment ; and to discover that truth is truth only 
as it is wrought into coherent, social and in- 
dividual life. 

* Rousseau, vol. ii. p. 57* 



LECTURE X. 

The First and Second Creative Periods Contrasted.— The Weight 
to be Attached to Individual Influence, Spencer, Taine. — Scott. 
— Byron. — Coleridge. — Wordsworth. — Shelley. 

The second creative period, the first thirty 
years of the present century, finds but one rival 
era in our literature. In this, as in that, revolu- 
tionary forces were at work, and the minds of men 
were awakened by various and powerful causes. 
As then, though foreign influences were active, 
native, national tendencies were pre-eminent. En- 
gland, in the first instance, stood proudly on the de- 
fensive, the champion of Protestantism ; and now, 
at least as she deemed it, of national constitutional 
development. No continental wars have been to 
England more significant than the struggles with 
Philip II. and Napoleon I. In each instance, she 
awaited a great invasion ; and in each the conflict 
of arms was united with one of opinions. 

This second period was equally fruitful with the 
first, and more varied in its productions. It does 
not, indeed, reach quite the elevation of the Eliza- 
bethan era ; it lies under the shadow of one or two 
of the great men of the earlier age ; but, this admit- 
ted, it shows a more diversified, vigorous and perva- 
sive literary activity than even that first outburst of 
life. In it, as in every great literary period, poetry 
was clearly pre-eminent, and this, notwithstanding 

(237) 



238 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

the fact that prose, in an unbroken and enlarged 
volume, came down from the previous time. In- 
quisitive, laborious, artistic prose multiplied in all 
directions, and added to its previous forms its most 
careful essays and best novels. Criticism, especi- 
ally in the review, the magazine, the journal, began 
that prodigious productiveness which has at length 
filled every portion of our atmosphere with its float- 
ing spores, springing up as moss and lichens on 
every stalwart trunk ; or as the literary must and 
mildew of the time on every decaying thing. 

Notwithstanding this unchecked power of prose, 
working for science or art, for use or pleasure, as it 
was able, poetry was the distinguishing feature of 
the time, and this under its best forms. Narrative, 
dramatic, lyric poetry prevailed, and when the di- 
dactic element was present, it took so meditative, 
intuitive, emotional a form as to impart a new, more 
spiritual, more profoundly poetic temper to our lit- 
erature. 

We now turn, having spoken of the character 
of the period and the general forces at work in 
it, to the individuals who fixed its precise type, 
and made it exactly what it was — to Scott, Byron, 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley. There is earnest 
discussion as to what shall be done with the indi- 
vidual in a philosophy of history. Some are willing, 
as Spencer, so to magnify the aggregate of external 
conditions ; the influence of climate, race, cultiva- 
tion, the accumulated products of descent ; the 
precise circumstances of the time and place on 
which he has fallen ; the social movement into 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 239 

which he is educated, as to leave him hardly more 
than a waif on a mighty current, whose direction 
and force he may indicate, but can do very little to 
control. Others, with much less reason, far more 
superficial in observation, are struck with the prom- 
inent part that a few great men take in affairs, and 
are ready to look upon them as the chief forces at 
work, as giving direction to events by their single 
volition. To these Spencer makes answer : 

" If, not stopping at the explanation of social 
progress as due to the great man, we go back a 
step, and ask, Whence comes the great man ? we 
find that the theory breaks down completely. * * 
Along with the whole generation of which he 
forms a minute part ; along with its institutions, 
language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudi- 
nous arts and appliances, he is the resultant of 
an enormous aggregate of causes that have been 
co-operating for ages. * * If, disregarding 
those accumulated results of experience, which 
current proverbs and the generalizations of psy- 
chologists alike express, you suppose that a New- 
ton might be born in a Hottentot family, that a 
Milton might spring up among the Andamanese, 
that a Howard or a Clarkson might have Fiji pa- 
rents, then you may proceed with facility to ex- 
plain social progress as caused by the actions of 
great men. But if all biological science, enforcing 
all popular belief, convinces you that by no possi- 
bility will an Aristotle come from a father and 
mother with facial angles of fifty degrees ; and that 
out of a tribe of cannibals, whose chorus in prepa- 



240 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

ration for a feast of human flesh is a kind of rhyth- 
mical roaring there is not the remotest chance of 
a Beethoven arising ; then you must admit the gen- 
esis of the great man depends on a long series of 
complex influences which has produced the race in 
which he appears, and the social state into which 
that race has slowly grown. If it be a fact that the 
great man may modify his nation in its structure 
and actions, it is also a fact that there must have 
been those antecedent modifications constituting 
national progress before he could be evolved. Be- 
fore he can re-make his society, his society must 
make him. So that all those changes of which he 
is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in 
the generations which give him birth. If there is 
to be anything like a real explanation of these 
changes, it must be sought in the aggregate of con- 
ditions out of which both he and they have arisen."* 
This presentation of Spencer has force as against 
the limited view of his adversaries, and is to be pre- 
ferred to the flippant theory of Taine, which refers 
so much of the history and character of Englishmen 
to external conditions. " They are," says he, "never 
comfortable in their country, they have to strive 
continually against cold or rain. They cannot live 
there carelessly, lying under a lovely sky, in a sul- 
try and clear atmosphere, their eyes filled with the 
noble oeauty and happy serenity of the land. They 
must work to live ; be attentive, exact ; close and 
repair their houses, wade boldly through the mud 
behind the plough, light their lamps in their shops 

* Popular Science Monthly. 



TAINE. 24I 

during the day. Their climate imposes endless in- 
convenience, and exacts endless endurance. Hence 
arise melancholy and the idea of duty. Man nat- 
urally thinks of life as a battle, oftener of black 
death which closes this deadly show, and leads so 
many plumed and disorderly processions to the si- 
lence and eternity of the grave. All this visible 
world is vain ; there is nothing true but human vir- 
tue, — the courageous energy with which man attains 
to self-command, the generous energy with which 
he employs himself in the service of others. On 
this view he fixes his eyes; they pierce through 
worldly gauds, neglect sensual joys to attain this. 
By such internal action the ideal is displaced; a 
new source of action springs up — the idea of right- 
eousness." • 

It would seem strange that the unbearable mud 
and weather, in themselves not less abundant in 
earlier than later times, left the Saxons so blood- 
thirsty a brood, such lawless revellers, and yet 
wrought righteousness in the English. If France 
lacks conscience in lacking clouds, misses reflection 
in missing the dismal retinue of storms, the English 
may indeed congratulate themselves on elemental 
conflicts which, displacing those of men, leave the 
streets of their capital unstained with blood, and 
beat out the germs of hasty, cruel and futile revolu- 
tion. We should hardly have looked for so much 
moral power in a drizzling rain, but if it be what 
Taine thinks it, we may well compose ourselves to 
its frequent return. On the whole, we accept the 

* History of English Literature, vol. i. p. 10 1. 
II 



242 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

philosophy of the Englishman, laboring" though he 
does under the epithet "unphilosophical," as against 
this ready theory of the Frenchman. 

The truth would seem to be, that, setting aside 
foreign forces often very influential, a nation's 
growth in kind and degree is determined by exter- 
nal conditions of climate, soil, position ; by consti- 
tutional national character and general cultivation, 
accumulated and transmitted in physical and intel- 
lectual and moral descent; and by individuals. 
Which of these three is the more controlling it may 
not be easy to decide, nor do they always maintain 
toward each other the same ratios of force. As 
national character becomes vigorous, external con- 
ditions are cast into the background. It is only in 
the earlier, the incipient stages of growth, that these 
seem to have a decisive control, and then over the 
direction rather than over the degree of activity. 
They constitute the conditions of necessity, and 
doors of opportunity, which in the beginning com- 
pel and invite action, but which, if growth follows, 
are soon overmastered by the forces which it sup- 
plies. The English are now commercial by a 
stronger fact than the possession of harbors. 

In striving to strike the balance of power be- 
tween the nation and the individual, between its 
combined movement as controlling its personal life, 
and its personal life as shaping and reshaping 
its combined movement, we are to bear in mind, 
that the two agencies are so interlaced as to be 
inseparable in their action. The individual worker, 
the great man, holds both elements in himself; 



THE INDIVIDUAL. 243 

he adds the personal type to the national type, 
and gives new efficiency to the general bias by the 
individual bent of soul that he brings to it. If it be 
true, as Spencer says, that before he, the man of 
genius, can remake society, society must make him, 
it is also true, that when he is actually at work on 
society, his efficiency is due more to what he brings 
to the common stock of qualities, than to these 
stock-qualities as held by him ; more to the moral 
altitude given him by personal endowments above 
the table-land of national character, than to the 
height of these plains themselves, whereon are 
mustered the nation. It is the head and shoulders 
of his own supremacy that give him dominion, 
though this dominion is to be expended in actual 
work on the level of the faculties which belong to 
his race. 

These two forces, the race-force and the person- 
al force, mutually limit each other. If genius is 
conditioned for its quality to the nation to which it 
belongs, the nation is also conditioned upon the 
presence of men of genius to express, intensify, and 
make effective in growth the national strength. If 
talent, for its efficiency, is dependent on the intel- 
lectual and moral state of those with whom it 
labors, so are these, in turn, dependent on their 
leaders for the full realization of their next step of 
progress. The nation and the individual grow to- 
gether, and are, therefore, in instant living inter- 
play. Each is what it is through the other, and 
neither can hold independent ground. If we wish 
critically to estimate their claims, we shall be able 



244 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

to do it best, not by watching the erratic, brilliant 
career of genius, to whom all forces seem second- 
ary ; nor by turning to the slow, irresistible steps of 
national growth, which, in the steady progress of 
centuries, sinks into seeming insignificance the 
individuals who have been partakers in it ; but by 
more carefully observing the momentary interplay 
of national and private life, by which the one is 
slowly transmuted into the other. 

In this common growth the individual is always 
primary. He alone thinks, he alone advances with 
a self-sufficing force. Take the nation at any stage 
of progress, early or late ; it must be gotten beyond 
that stage by the new views, the discoveries, inven- 
tions, prowess of persons. It will remain inert till 
some one man, or class of men, move, pioneer the 
way, and teach others to follow. So all progress has 
been achieved. The growing point is in every case 
the individual. The position he shall start from is 
determined for him by the nation, that is by previous 
individual workers, the men of genius and talent 
that have gone before him ; but the next step of 
progress, for himself and the nation, he must take. 
The individual, therefore, is always primary, initial, 
the seat of living activity ; while the nation is sec- 
ondary, residuary, receptive, the trunk-growth, or, 
as in the coral, the rock-growth, left behind. The 
terminal buds on a tree owe their position to the 
organic development that has preceded them ; but 
this growth has all been initiated by them, as must 
be all farther growth. All that is really additive, 
then, is due to the individual, while preservation, 



MEN OF GENIUS. 245 

continuity, the conditions of increase, come from 
the nation. The nation is the storehouse wherein 
are treasured the fruits of individual labor. 

In reference to society, to the nation, the men 
of genius, so far as they have genius, are supernat- 
ural forces, that is, forces unexplained by their 
antecedents. As men normally endowed with the 
national constitution, tastes, disposition, they are 
natural products, sufficiently explained by the cir- 
cumstances of their birth. In the conditions under 
which their powers are expended, the work that falls 
to them, and the general limits of its efficiency, they 
are also included in the national development. But 
in so far as they have genius, in so far as they tran- 
scend the national type, as they are a peculiar and 
personal power, they remain unexplained, are an 
original and independent source of influence. We 
have no recipe for the production of a Shakespeare, 
no hint as to the causes which will yield a Bacon. 
Shakespeare, as Shakespeare, is a primitive, super- 
natural power in English history ; working indeed 
under the conditions of that history, but not in- 
cluded in them or explained by them. He expounds 
history, our literary history, more than that history 
can ever expound him. If genius is altogether a nat- 
ural product, one of ways and means, it is to us, as 
yet wholly ignorant of its productive conditions, as a 
supernatural force, one that comes and goes without 
challenge. The soil may determine what trees 
shall be present in a forest, those already in posses- 
sion may still farther restrict its form of growth, 
but the vital force of each species has helped to 



246 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

decide, and must continue to decide, its make-up. 
Great is the constitutional force of society at any 
one moment ; but into it, the force of a thousand 
individuals has already been wrought ; into it other 
independent spirits, in part only its own progeny, 
may press their way, and, living influences, living 
in and with the national life, may move as it moves, 
yet cause it to swerve more and more under their 
steady pressure. The constitutional vigor of soci- 
ety, great as it may be, is yet plastic to the indi- 
vidual hand, and in time may receive any form from 
it. To this last element in the second creative 
period, that of genius, we now turn. 

The outside influences which went to the com- 
position of Walter Scott, as a poet and novelist, are 
very obvious. The national character and history 
were vigorously at work in him. An intimate 
knowledge of the minstrelsy of the Scottish border, 
and of its wild traditions ; a spirit thoroughly im- 
bued with the mediaeval, chivalrous temper, softened 
and transfigured by a poetic imagination; and 
familiarity with the natural beauties of Scotland, 
with an enthusiastic appreciation of them, united to 
give shape and tone to his works. He was not a 
product of the present, nor of the past, but of the 
past history of his country as transfigured by the 
present, sifted of its harsh features, and wrought 
into the lively, humane dreams of poetry. These 
historic forces were not merely felt and transferred 
by Walter Scott, he had a peculiar affinity with 
them. He transformed them in the presentation, 
and gave them a power and life native to himself 



WALTER SCOTT. 247 

What he added to them by a glowing fancy is as 
observable and essential as the material itself. The 
trend of the banks account for the bed of the stream, 
but not for the torrent that fills it. This is fed by 
the deep fountains of the earth and the passing 
clouds of heaven ; the great forces of nature are 
every moment busy with this labor. 

Walter Scott was endowed with the powers of 
a very large and loving observation of outside life. 
With comparatively little spiritual penetration or 
interpretation, he easily seizes in nature and in man 
their sensible, significant features. The insight 
involved in this, and it is very considerable, belongs 
to him ; but he does not go much beyond it. He 
renders actions in their outside spirit and power, 
but does not care to analyze them, to study their 
sources, relations, issues. He gives a glowing, ac- 
tive picture, renders in a lively way the flow of 
events, and leaves us to query as we will about the 
impulses, the good and the evil that are in them ; 
to search for the problems of life they contain, and 
the answers they make to them. Yet there is so 
full a rending of character, such a catching of the 
flavor of men and things, that we are at once 
endowed with the lively observation of our author, 
and may, though we are not provoked to, go 
deeper than he in our inquiries. The light, 
fleeting impressions with which he crowds the im- 
agination are well shown in his picture of Loch 
Katrine in the morning light, 

" The mountain shadows on her breast 
Were neither broken nor at rest ; 



248 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

In bright uncertainty they lie, 

Like future joys to fancy's eye." 

Thus he touches the symbol and the meaning 
beneath it, the action and the life that prompts it, 
and lets the two glide on together, without division 
or discussion. With this temper of mind, so personal 
to him, so spirited, active and objective, Walter 
Scott deals with wholesome, energetic, out-door 
forces. Reaching little that is either direct or high 
in intellectual stimulus he puts us in contact with 
robust life, and extracts mental health from physical 
inspiration and courageous action. The morbid, 
mean and cowardly skulk away ; the faithful, mag- 
nanimous and bold are in the foreground. 

The likings and tastes of Walter Scott were at 
one with the spirit of his works. Chivalrous, aristo- 
cratic proclivities, in their best form, entered largely 
into his character. He had little in common with 
modern democracy ; the amenities, sympathies, and 
social dependencies of the old regime he thoroughly 
appreciated. The revolutions of his own time had 
slight effect upon him. While others were stirred by 
their social promise, he, called into actual service 
by the threatened invasion of Bonaparte, was com- 
posing his Marmion, as he walked " his powerful 
steed up and down upon the Porto Bello sands within 
the beating of the surge, and now- and then plunged 
in his spurs, to go off as at a charge with the spray 
dashing about him."* So lightly did these events, 
ploughing deep furrows in more philosophical minds, 
slide over or lose themselves in his pre-engaged 

* Reed's English Poets, vol. ii. p. 81. 



WALTER SCOTT. 249 

fancies. Walter Scott was a very genuine man, 
though a somewhat antiquated one. His strong 
bias makes him limited in the range of his works. 
He left poetry and turned to fiction, as he himself 
said, because he "felt the prudence of giving way 
before the more forcible and powerful genius of 
Byron." Had he not also exhausted the particular 
vein of poetry which his tastes and attainments 
fitted him to work? Endless production was here 
an impossibility. The material at his disposal be- 
came more available in the novel than in the poem. 
A monotony of form had begun to show itself as the 
result of a monotony of matter. Variety is a sterner 
necessity in high art than in fiction, and the want 
of it is more immediately apparent. The very 
felicity of adaptation of material, language, metre 
in the best of Scott's poems cut him off from con- 
tinuous production. Emphatic in their kind, they 
could not return again and again. He grew weary, 
and others were weary with him. It is true, more- 
over, that Byron's works u wonderfully excited and 
intoxicated the public mind at first, and for a time 
made all other poetry seem spiritless and weari- 
some." Scott stands alone in his poetic works. 
Some may hastily depreciate them ; none can speak 
slightingly of their execution. 

Personal passion was to Byron what national 
romance was to Scott. Strong, restless, ungovern- 
able emotion, seldom beneficent, often startling and 
destructive, underlay his volcanic nature. An 
irritable, overbearing self-consciousness, the pro- 
duct of lawless, selfish impulses, of appetites and 



250 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

passions keenly alive to pleasure, and forever baf- 
fled in its pursuit, of a soul in proud wilfulness 
and real strength refusing to be taught, was the 
distinguishing spiritual feature in the character of 
Byron. He was constitutionally immoral in the 
sense that he constantly felt, and as constantly 
chafed at, moral law. The infidelity of the time 
wrought no repose in him. He did not accept un- 
belief indifferently, quietly as a philosophy ; he fled 
to it as a poor defense against belief, as a refuge 
from the bitter rebukes and endless strifes of his 
own restless spirit. He was intensely immoral 
because he felt so intensely the moral law, and so 
struggled to break his way through it. He could 
not for a moment overlook or forget it. Mere stu- 
pidity, mere brutish ness and mere speculation were 
alike impossible to him. He took the fears of un- 
belief, the extinguished hopes of materialism, home 
to a high poetic temperament, that to its very core 
revolted against them, and could only have been as- 
suaged, lifted, inspired by pure and profound belief. 
From the strife about him for social liberty he gath- 
ered little save more wind for the flame of his own 
passions. With the restraints of liberty he had no 
sympathy, and was only once blessed by its spirit, 
when helped for a brief period by the Greek revo- 
lution into a more generous and objective life. 

The intense, passionate nature of Byron, while 
it was the propelling force of his art, yet robbed him 
of that large, catholic success which his lively wit, 
fruitful imagination, and quick intuition of beauty 
seemed to promise. It narrowed down his percep- 



BYRON. 251 

tions of character, and at the same time perverted 
them. His ideal man and his ideal woman stand 
over against each other, complements in passion, 
but alike false to the true nobility of their sex. 
On the one side are pride, strength, disobedience, 
indulgence ; on the other concession, devotion, 
the smothered fires of a soul that cannot escape 
beyond the heat of its own narrow, intense, blind 
life, but must needs, with none of the rallying 
forces of self-respect, smoulder and perish in it. 
There is in the one no patience, no restraint, no 
magnanimity, no nobility; in the other there is no 
worthiness, no independence, nothing holy and 
uncontaminate. The poems of Byron are compara- 
tively lost, by the lie which, hidden in his own 
soul, so often reappears in them ; by the futile 
and ever renewed effort to unite beauty, first to 
license and then to the sullen, resentful moods of 
impotent rebellion. His wit, as in Don Juan, thus 
plays phosphorescent about things dead and cor- 
rupt ; his pathos springs suddenly up with no suf- 
ficient nourishment in the worth of the characters 
that call it forth ; his yearnings for that which is 
better are only regrets, momentary rents in hurry- 
ing, wind-sped clouds. His cry is a single, plain- 
tive, despairing note, as of a bird lost in the 
darkness : 

" No more, no more, oh never more on me 
The freshness of the heart can fall like dew 
Which out of all the lovely things we see 
Extracts emotions beautiful and new." 

Don Juan, the work on which Byron squandered 



252 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

his ripest intellectual strength, lacks most of all the 
beauty of character, the coherence of healthy, 
wholesome life. It more than any other of his 
poems is breaking out everywhere with his own 
corrupt, defiant spirit, hastening on to death. The 
flowers grow, but they are passion flowers, and we 
catch the rank odors of the saturated soil that bears 
them. The mischief which his own nature wrought 
in him is seen in this increased distortion of his 
works, in the intense resentment it called forth in 
him against any restraint or criticism, and in his 
personal antipathies to those of a nobler spirit. 

The immorality of Byron's works consists super- 
ficially in their licentiousness ; far more deeply and 
pervasively in his confounding lawlessness with 
strength, accepting proud despair as the portion of 
the soul, and presenting pleasure as the bait by 
which free, noble spirits are caught and hopelessly 
entangled in the net-work of malign world-forces, 
the providences of a demiurge. He had no power 
to perceive the beauties of faith, or the loving guid- 
ance and strength of the God of the faithful. Byron 
is fitted to captivate bold, active, restless, unreflect- 
ive spirits, who have not yet exhausted the foun- 
tains of their physical life, and can still give a dash 
of freedom and a relish of appetite to rebellion ; but 
the sober, disciplined, deepened, dispassionate mind 
finds increasingly less to love and to cherish in him. 

"The Byron-fever is in fact a disease belonging 
to youth, as the whooping-cough to childhood — 
working some occult good no doubt in the end. It 
has its origin, perhaps, in the fact that the poet 



BYRON. 253 

makes no demand either on the intellect or the con- 
science, but confines himself to friendly intercourse 
with those passions whose birth long precedes that 
of choice in their objects — whence a wealth of emo- 
tion is squandered. It is long before we discover 
that far richer feeling is the result of a regard bent 
on the profound and the pure." * 

Byron himself is the best antidote to his works. 
That life and those poems put side by side, and 
read together, are a chapter in ethics which few can 
mistake. As the rocket is driven aloft by the reac- 
tion, the spurn of its own spiteful forces ; reaching 
the upper air, explodes in yellow, purple and lurid 
light, so Byron forced his way upward with scorn 
and repulsion, flamed out in wild, explosive, bril- 
liant excesses, and disappeared in darkness made 
only the more palpable. 

"Man's a strange animal, and makes strange use 
Of his own nature." 

As Scott was the poet of the chivalrous temper 
of the past, so was Byron the poet of the wild, pas- 
sionate, lawless one of the present — a bold, appeti- 
tive spirit, spurning resentfully at restraint. Each 
added genius to a constitutional tendency of society, 
and secured a large following. 

Coleridge and Wordsworth were closely united 
by friendship, by an agreement tempered by a 
diversity of tastes, and by a union of sentiments. 
They both accepted with the generosity and impet- 
uosity of youth the new hopes of liberty ; and b&th, 
as years ripened the understanding, came to see 

* Alec Forbes, by MacDonald. 



254 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

more clearly its conditions and limitations. Southey 
shared with them this oscillation between the en- 
thusiasm of sentiment and the caution of judgment, 
the latter gaining with him early and easily the 
mastery. 

Coleridge possessed the most undeniable and 
wide-ranging genius of any one of his time. Its 
practical force, its sustained insight were greatly 
restricted by a vacillation, a weakness of will, which 
loosened his powers, and lost for them their true 
pivot of revolution, their smoothness and harmony 
of action. His naturally enervate temper was en- 
hanced in early life by the lack of vigorous disci- 
pline, and later by an indulgence in opium. He 
thus fell into pitiful imbecility, taxing for support 
the charity of friends, and craving from the charity 
of Heaven a forgiveness that issued in no new 
strength. Thus natural gifts so varied and so great 
that they only called for patient and wise use to 
put him among the few great masters of men were 
humbled and in a measure lost. 

Philosophy, a philosophy that sprang from and 
expressed the insight of the soul, was the seat of 
his strength ; but philosophy was so united in him 
to a creative fancy, that as many remember the 
poet as the sage. These two even-handed gifts 
made him the very best of critics ; and appreciative, 
suggestive criticism became a third endowment. 
The influence of these three gifts were enhanced 
by their harmony, and by his unusual conversational 
powers ; or better, perhaps, by his ability to impress 
himself upon others in harangues which took the 



COLERIDGE. 255 

place of conversation. If what Carlyle says of him 
be partially true, "I have heard Coleridge talk, 
with eager, musical energy, two stricken hours, his 
face radiant and moist, and communicate no mean- 
ing whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, cer- 
tain of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly listening 
in hope, " * the force and inspiration of the man who 
could hold, and, on these hard conditions, suffi- 
ciently reward, superior men, ever reluctant to be 
mere listeners, are only the more apparent. He 
says farther, " Coleridge's talk and speculation was 
the emblem of himself; in it as in him a ray of 
heavenly inspiration struggled, in a tragically inef- 
fectual degree, with the weakness of the flesh and 
blood." f 

The centre of his philosophy was a stern resist- 
ance to materialism, a reintroduction of spiritual 
intuitions, a reassertion of the reason. This gave 
new faith to his love of freedom, new devotion to 
his religious belief, deeper insight to his criticism, a 
loftier inspiration to his poetry. 

An enervate will, and that too in connection 
with an indulgence that was undisguised sin before 
the keen, rebuking eye of his own soul, was espe- 
cially fatal to the upward, poised, independent flight 
that belonged to his spiritual temperament. All 
are struck alike by the fragmentary character of his 
work. His great poems are comparatively brief; 
some of them odes that could receive form under a 
single, undivided impulse, the subtly woven words 

* Introduction to Coleridge's Poems. Little & Brown, 
f Ibid. 



256 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

springing at once from the emotion, as "the flame 
from its feeding oil." This "sublime man," as Car- 
lyle calls him, possessed of "a prophetic or magician 
character," to whose actual endowments men were 
ready to add a halo of mystery, wielded an influence 
quite beyond the direct results of his works. He 
gave truths, easily lost to the English mind, a fresh 
lighting up, and startled with them, when he did 
not disperse, the shadows of materialism. It is 
minds like his that furnish turning points of thought. 
By them we pass a headland, or double a continent, 
and find new waters and new tracts before us. If 
we are tempted profoundly to regret the dislocated 
products of such a mind, the vast fields of broken 
ice-floe that it sends drifting by, we are yet propor- 
tionately impressed by the brilliant lights ; the 
strange, weird forms ; and deep, exhaustless and 
inscrutable forces, that are here. Coleridge, as 
Coleridge, appeals to the thoughts and imagination 
hardly less than if he had carefully planned and 
perfectly finished his works. The quick view that 
we catch from some bold Alpine summit finds the 
foil of its wealth, its fascination to memory, in the 
very indistincness and haste that make us wish to 
return to it. Carlyle acknowledges with too little 
appreciation the great fragmentary thoughts that 
fell from the lips of Coleridge. They sometimes 
found the richest soil, and brought forth their one 
hundred-fold. Wordsworth, DeQuincey, Hazlitt pre- 
sented minds with whom a suggestion was a harvest. 
Wordsworth is in important respects the fore- 
most poet of the period under consideration. He 



WORDSWORTH. 257 

gave with deliberate purpose through a long life 
his undivided and growing powers to his own favor- 
ite pursuit. He coveted success, not so much as 
an ambition as a thirst of the soul for high spiritual 
insight and an effective, sufficient rendering of the 
things seen. 

" Blessings be with them — and eternal praise, 
- Who gave us nobler lives, and nobler cares — 
The poets, who on earth have made us heirs 
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays ! 
Oh ! might my name be numbered among theirs, 
Then gladly would I end my mortal days." 

Wordsworth is among the most voluminous of 
English poets, — the omnipresence of the poetic sen- 
timent was an article of his creed and practice — 
and none of them have more decided or original 
characteristics. He was the centre of the Lake 
School, a name that sprang from local connections, 
and turned, in its application, more on personal 
friendship and sympathy, a general concurrence of 
feeling, than on a single theory of art shared by its 
members. Southey was most nearly united to 
Wordsworth in critical views, but between their 
poems there is no close agreement. The ability of 
Wordsworth, his steadfastness and faithfulness, won 
him pre-eminence in. the new movement ; and with 
these, other causes concurred. He announced a 
theory of poetry, and gave it in his works extreme 
illustration. He suffered the harshest criticism, 
and slowly conquered bitter, dominant prejudice by 
expansion in his own line of effort under his own 
conceptions. This forcing growth against the ac- 



258 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

cepted canons of art, laid down by the acknowledged 
critics of the day, like Jeffrey, and under the con- 
tempt of popular poets, like Byron, drew attention 
and sympathy to the independent power that 
achieved it. Wordsworth has hence been assigned 
a position that hardly belongs to him. He has 
been looked on as founding a school of poetry, giv- 
ing birth to a new era, rather than as one who best 
embodied and most completely presented a spirit 
that had in various forms, for years, been gaining 
ground in English literature. Though not the first, 
he is the highest, and most central, summit in the 
mountain range skirting the new realm of poetry ; 
and stands disclosed, quiet, serene, eternal in the 
clear transforming light of an earnest, reflective im- 
agination. 

It is not altogether strange that Wordsworth 
should have met with severe criticism. His theory 
of art was not well put ; some of its illustrations, as 
The Idiot Boy, were extreme ; while criticism, bur- 
dened with a large inheritance of conventional opin- 
ions and conventional praise descending from Pope, 
his cotemporaries and subsequent admirers, was 
still inclined to the cold, formal and preceptive in 
art. The pith and truth of the theory of Words- 
worth, as shown by his poems, are found in the fact, 
that all forms of life have in them poetical elements, 
and require only a sensitive, intuitive presentation 
for their disclosure. Herein lies the genius of 
Wordsworth, that with intense, pervasive feeling ; 
quick, penetrative sympathy, he is able to move 
among all objects, touching the lowest in human 



WORDSWORTH. 259 

life, and those in nature most remote from ordinary 
insight, and bear everywhere with him an inspira- 
tion and a rendering that disclose their hold upon 
the human soul, their share in the problems of the 
universe. This is what he has actually done, and 
this we may well believe is what he intended to do. 
His own statement, however, of his principles of 
art is not convincing, and seems to have been 
shaped in part by contradiction, by resistance to 
the coldly elevated and critical spirit that had gone 
before him, and whose influence was still predomi- 
nant. He described "his object as being to ascer- 
tain how far the purposes of poetry might be ful- 
filled by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection 
of the real language of men, in a state of vivid sen- 
sation." Herein he failed to do full honor to the 
appreciation, the interpretation, that always abide 
with the poet, and which so distinguish him from 
other men. " He goes out of his way to be at- 
tacked." * How easily Wordsworth's omnivorous 
poetic fancy invites ridicule, the criticism of Taine 
suffices to show. 

Wordsworth affords an admirable illustration of 
a new tendency in art, mounting rapidly into full 
power, and henceforth made dominant, by virtue 
of its contact with one soul in which it lights and 
feeds the flames of genius. An influence before 
but dimly perceived became speedily enthroned, 
and gave a date for a new intellectual dynasty. 

The social and political forces were at first as 
keenly felt by Wordsworth as the poetical ones, 

* Landor's Conversations. 



260 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

though his own strong spirit tempered them to 
moderation as he slowly and painfully struggled 
back to the footing of experience and faith. His 
placid, thoughtful and retiring disposition could 
hold no terms with fruitless and bloody revolution. 
He loved too well the peaceful promise of nature 
and society. He thus prays in behalf of his own 
nation : 

" Oh that with soul-aspirings more intense, 
And heart-humiliations more profound, 
This people, long so happy, so renowned 
For liberty, would seek from God defense 
Against far heavier ill — the pestilence 
Of Revolution, impiously unbound ! " 

How diverse this from the feeling which had led 
him earlier to exclaim of the French Revolution : 

" O pleasant exercise of hope and joy ! 
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood 
Upon our side, we who were strong in love ! 
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven ! " 

It is not easy for us fully to understand the 
darkening down of the entire spiritual heavens 
incident to the bitter disappointments of blind, futile 
progress, which has served to express the pas- 
sions of men, rather than to establish their con- 
victions. It is not easy to get again the foothold 
of faith after the shock and paralysis attendant 
on the overthrow of too sanguine hopes. Words- 
worth was a reflective, meditative poet. It was not 
the form and garniture of the world that he loved to 
present, but its emotional force, its suggestions to 
the spiritual nature. It was not action in human 



ADDISON. 26l 

life, but its under-current of sentiment, that he 
delineated. He is especially undramatic, for it is 
not the surface-play of events that occupies him, 
but the secret nurture of the soul, its half blind 
responses to the circumstances that try it. Words- 
worth above all other poets calls for a spiritual 
sympathy of his readers with himself. On this 
condition only we pass with him those invisible 
lines which divide mere facts from the Elysian 
fields of the poetic fancy. Says Taine, "When I 
shall have emptied my head of all worldly thoughts, 
and looked up to the clouds for ten years to re- 
fine my soul, I shall love this poetry. Meanwhile, 
the web of imperceptible threads by which Words- 
worth endeavors to bind together all sentiments 
and embrace all nature, breaks in my fingers ; 
it is too fragile ; it is a woof of woven spider web, 
spun by a metaphysical imagination, and tearing 
as soon as a solid hand tries to touch it." * 

Ought not Taine to have asked, How came 
this man to spring out of English mud and Eng- 
lish utilities ? Genius, even in an English soul, 
breaks, in a troublesome way, the cobweb threads 
of a too ingenious philosophy. Tenuous as are the 
connections of Wordsworth's poetry, they are too 
strong for the reasoning of Taine, 

To the great personal forces represented in 
Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, there are to 
be added others of diverse and somewhat inferior 
power, Crabbe, Southey, Moore, Keats, and above 
all, Shelley. In vigor and boldness of poetic fac- 

* History of Eng. Literature, vol ii. p. 262. 



262 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

ulties, Shelley is scarcely surpassed by any. No 
region was too remote, too etherial for his sus- 
tained and sweeping flight, no path was so slight 
or sinuous as to be altogether lost under his 
searching eye. In him the imaginative impulses 
were in excess ; he felt commonplace too weakly, 
and returned to it, and its ally, common-sense, too 
rarely. He was instantly lost to the slow, plod- 
ding steps of judgment. Above all the poets of 
his time, he was fired with revolutionary hopes, 
and struggled resentfully on toward the better times 
which the successive stages of change served only 
to postpone. He found himself at war with religion, 
with society, and government, a war prompted by 
the compass and humanity of his sentiments, and 
a resistance to restraints whose ground he failed to 
comprehend. Shelley needed only more sober and 
solid thought, a mind ballasted by more common 
and cheap qualities, to have moved among the high- 
est. The poetic elements super-abounded, and 
allowed him to be driven before a whirlwind of 
sentiment, which found in him magnificent, though 
too often wild, utterance. What his biographer 
says of Landor, — who also deserves more attention 
than he receives — was equally true of Shelley ; 
though the one was impelled more by will, and the 
other by affection : " What was wanting in his 
books and in his life was submission to some kind 
of law." * 

The beauty of his poetry never quite covers 
with its verdure the volcanic forces at work under 

* Life of Landor, p. 676. 



SHELLEY. 263 

it. A sense neither of safety and sufficiency nor 
of quiet hope settles down on his landscape. 
We are dealing with agencies that work with 
terrific energy, nor always with a sober fore- 
sight of results. One cannot but love Shelley, 
and delight in him. The generosity and eleva- 
tion of his sentiments cleanse him from the soil 
that attaches to the selfish passions of Byron. 
We can only wish that a safe substratum of 
thought had upheld and nourished all this splen- 
dor of imagination, this enthusiasm of soul. He 
thus states his own purpose in his preface to 
The Revolt of Islam : 

" It is an experiment on the temper of the 
public mind, as to how far a thirst for a hap- 
pier condition of moral and political society sur- 
vives, among the enlightened and refined, the 
tempests which have shaken the age in which 
we live. I have sought to enlist the harmony 
of metrical language, the etherial combinations 
of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transitions of 
human passion, all those elements which essen- 
tially compose a poem, in the cause of liberal 
and comprehensive morality ; and in the view of 
kindling within the bosom of my readers a vir- 
tuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty 
and justice, that faith and hope in something 
good, which neither violence nor prejudice can 
ever totally extinguish among mankind." 

Who can fail to sympathize with this daunt- 
less effort of a noble mind, though it misses the 
conditions of success, or breaks restively through 



264 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

them when they lie before it? Shelley was as 
foreign to the English temper on one side, as 
Wordsworth on another, and both must find in- 
terpretation and honor in the depths of natures 
akin to their own. Such men bring to us the 
trying test of appreciation, by which we define 
our place among men, and settle what in heaven 
and earth lies open to us. 



LECTURE XL 

Last three centuries. — Present period one of diffusion. — Science, 
Lectures, History.— Chief features, the novel and the news- 
paper. — Character of the novel, its divisions, its office. — 
Newspapers, their multiplication, advantages, disadvantages. — 
Promise of the times. 

The last three centuries, the seventeenth, eigh- 
teenth and nineteenth, have each opened with de- 
cided literary tendencies. The first dawned in the 
clear, growing light of the Elizabethan era, when 
the early forces of our literature were in full play ; 
the second came forward with less fascination, with 
more tame and tempered light, as our Augustan 
age of art ; and the third restored us again to the 
impassioned powers and dew freshness of our na- 
tional growth, broke once more in a day of crea- 
tive energy, clothed anew with beauty and with 
strength. The middle of this century, which open- 
ed so auspiciously, it is too early to characterize 
in its relation to those periods that have gone 
before and those that are to follow. Not till the 
issues of an age are seen, can we certainly say for 
what it is making ready, in what direction it is 
modifying the life it has received. Certainly, these 
midway years of the present century, are .not dis- 
tinctively creative in art, as compared with those 
that preceded them. They seem rather to indicate 
a gentle subsidence of those inventive powers which 
12 (265) 



266 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

so exultingly lifted , the national mind in Scott, 
Byron, Wordsworth. 

The present may prove the slope and expansion 
of these high summits into beautiful and arable 
plains, to be joined again on their farther side to 
rival mountain ranges ; or it may be, so wakeful is 
the critical feeling with us, but the opening of one 
of those prairie stretches of great fertility and 
slight diversity, consoling the appetites rather than 
inflaming the imagination of men. 

The present is a prose rather than a poetic era, 
and this by the bulk, central body and quality of 
its productiveness. There is, perhaps, more poetry 
written to-day than ever before, and much of it is 
very good ; but there are very few poets who com- 
mand the attention of the English nations, — those 
distinct or united nationalities, that have laid down 
liberal boundaries of present and future power in 
every quarter of the globe. It is difficult, indeed, 
to send a tidal wave along these conjoint, mobile 
lines of language and literature, spreading through 
every branch of the great English people, and few are 
doing it. Questions of science, new theories, new 
fictions, chase each other more rapidly around the 
English globe, than new poems. 

While, however, it is a prose period, one of very 
diversified and very busy inquiry, of sharp and 
destructive criticism, of bold theory, and of practical 
reform everywhere, and especially among English- 
men, cisatlantic and transatlantic, it can better be 
considered, waiting for its final literary relations to 
disclose themselves, as one of diffusion. In this 



A PERIOD OF DIFFUSION. 267 

particular, it is broadly and nobly distinguished 
from every age that has gone before it. This very 
startling fact of diffusion, this spread of richly-laden 
waters over every cultivated field, this leaving a 
deposit of thought, not merely along conventional 
lines in rich river bottoms, but over the scant and 
remote acres of the poor, may have little interest 
for mere literati, but is of profound concernment 
to the philanthropist. Above all ages, our own 
deserves honor for this enlargement of thought, 
this scattering everywhere of some scant measure 
at least of the treasures of literary art. From this 
practical side, we shall chiefly consider this practi- 
cal period, this period, that halts a little in the 
merely intellectual march of the race, that it may 
send its voice abroad and backward, gathering on 
every side enlarged numbers into the fellowship of its 
strength, and waiting to compact its ranks, before 
it renews its advance. 

The scientific is, on the whole, the pre- 
dominant phase of thought with us. Philosophy 
suffers disparagement ; historical, religious and 
social dogmas are kept in perpetual agitation and 
irritation by the bearings on them of the scientific 
spirit, its theories and its facts. This science reaches 
the people in inventions and discoveries, in in- 
numerable lines of industrial improvement. It is 
not content, however, with this ; popularized in a 
great variety of ways, it seeks and everywhere finds 
an enlarged and enlarging audience. This can- 
not be called an age of oratory, for the same reason 
that it is not a poetic one ; but certainly, no period 



268 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

ever beheld so many who have sought the general 
ear for purposes of instruction. If the resounding 
oration has been displaced by the more modest 
lecture, this truly has been attended with results 
as benign and as far-reaching as have ever fallen 
to oratory. It has become the office of speaking 
more frequently to present and expound the truth 
than to enforce it, and into this branch of in- 
struction men spring up everywhere by tens, by 
hundreds, by thousands. 

The love of facts, near and remote, that belongs 
to science, shows itself also in history. Historical 
research, criticism and composition, have been 
greatly enlarged in the present period. The phi- 
losophy of history, the leading forces that have 
wrought in it, have been diligently sought into by 
such men as Hallam, Buckle, Lecky, Stanley, Tylor, 
while history in the common acceptance of the 
term has been voluminously written with more than 
wonted insight into the connection of events, and 
more than wonted wisdom in their selection. Kings 
and conquerors have ceased to occupy the entire 
historic stage, and the condition, customs and opin- 
ions of the masses of men, claim their share of 
attention. The list of historical writers has never 
been larger, or indicated better perception or more 
power, either here or in England, than during the 
forty years which have just passed away. Macau- 
lay, Grote, Arnold, Merivale, Rawlinson, Milman, 
Mahon, Froude, Kinglake, Freeman, Bancroft, 
Prescott, Motley, constitute but leading figures in 
the laborious group. 



THE NOVEL AND THE NEWSPAPER. 269 

The two departments of literature, however, 
which have had the widest popular influence, and 
are most characteristic of the period as one of diffu- 
sion, are the novel and the periodical. Gathering 
the last in its manifold forms under one term ex- 
pressing the most typical member of the group, we 
may say, the novel and the newspaper are the most 
peculiar and influential of the literary forces at work 
at the present time. The novel is the most purely 
artistic prose production, and is most closely allied 
to history, also with us particularly ambitious of 
literary excellence. The novel adds poetic to prose 
qualities. The creative faculties are uppermost in 
it, since it calls out and orders events in the strict 
development of a subjective purpose, in the expres- 
sion and execution of a conception. The poem is 
not more plastic, does not more wait on the mould- 
ing touch of the thought which creates it, than does 
the novel. 

As primarily and immediately does the novel 
deal with the emotions. All emotions, under every 
variety of condition, fall to it, and one supreme emo- 
tion, one supreme sympathy, waits habitually upon 
it, that of love. All that can be made of human life 
in its conjoint and individual unfolding, in its serial 
forces, is open to the novelist ; and none, therefore, 
can search more deeply the human spirit, put 
together more constructively its passions and im- 
pulses, or trace more consecutively and freely its 
types of character, the varieties and issues of its 
action. No field can be more open, more interest- 



270 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

ing, closer to the human heart, and to human life 
than that traversed by the novel. 

While it has free access to these highest ele- 
ments of poetry, while it is charged with no cum- 
bersome, didactic duty, but can hold itself open to 
the allurements of pleasure, it is still possessed of 
much more liberty than the poem. Criticism, 
theory, insight, observation of every sort can be 
woven into the narrative, making its progress in- 
structive and brilliant. It is not held to the close 
conditions of the drama. It can talk of, as well as 
through, its characters. The novelist, as a third 
party, can interpret, criticise, open up on unexpect- 
ed sides his personages, cast on them, and bring 
out of them every variety of side-light. At all 
events, this is the style of the English novel, and 
we hold it to be the true liberty of this prose poetry. 
The novelist is not bound to evolve, in and under 
his characters and their actions, his entire thought, 
leaving the reader, as before a painting, to pene- 
trate and unfold the conception as he is able. The 
novelist stands on more intimate terms than this 
with his audience. He is present in his own per- 
son, in his own studio, and may throw out such 
lively hints, or give such clues of thought as he 
thinks best, provided always that he keeps all eyes 
directed to the characters delineated, and unites in 
an easy, living way, every sentiment to their devel- 
opment. This personality of the writer and pro- 
gress with us from one to another picture in his art- 
gallery, constitute a large part of the attraction of 
the novel. It moves in an easier, more familiar 



THE NOVEL. 27 1 

and less commanding way than the poem, and has 
a thousand chances offered to say what is upper- 
most. Not merely in preface and initial chapters, 
but in any moment of leisure, it takes up its readers 
on familiar terms of cheerful gossip, and binds them 
to itself with new links of sympathy. 

Works of fiction may be divided into romances 
and novels. The two differ from each other in the 
element of truth. The typical novel has this com- 
plete. It adheres to the line of characters it has 
chosen to delineate, with thorough and exact repre- 
sentation, striving to make them clearly drawn 
counterparts of those real persons whom they rep- 
resent. The romance lacks truth, and that in the 
worst of all ways, by insensible departures, by ex- 
cessive coloring, by glaring and false lights. The 
romance chooses its characters from remote, unfa- 
miliar quarters, gives them a fanciful elevation in 
power and prowess, surrounds them by novel cir- 
cumstances, verges on the supernatural or passes 
its limits, and makes much of fictitious sentiments, 
such as those which characterized chivalry. The 
poor, sensational novel has points of close union 
with the earlier romance, represented by Walpole 
in The Castle of Otranto. 

It is against the romance element, ever likely 
to appear in historical novels, as it appears in history 
itself, when it runs like a child after the glittering 
march and sonorous sounds of war, that most of 
the moral objections to works of fiction hold. Un- 
reality, giddy show, easy victory, the sensuous 
gliding on of a dream, are, indeed, most enervating 



272 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

to the moral nature, and evaporate the sweet, 
genuine sentiments of the heart in a dry, hot, 
peevish and indolent atmosphere. The novel, so 
far as it adheres to truth, and treats of life broadly, 
descending to the lowest in grade, deeply and with 
spiritual forecast, seeing to the bottom, is not only 
not open to these objections, but rather calls for 
the reverse commendation. 

The novel is divisible into two general kinds, 
the pictorial and the ethical. Pictorial novels may 
be subdivided into four kinds : those which deline- 
ate, under historic characters, the traits of a nation ; 
those which give renewed life to a period present or 
remote ; those which present a particular rank in 
society ; or a particular calling in life : or historical, 
descriptive, social and professional novels. Ethical 
novels may be divided in two classes : those which 
enforce some especial reform ; and those which offer 
a general study of character : or reformatory and 
creative novels. No novel is purely of one kind. 
They are classified by predominant features. The 
most strictly historic novel will still present a study 
of characters, and may offer a good epitome of the 
manners of a particular period or of a certain rank. 
Yet most works of fiction are constructed under 
such definite aims as to assign them readily, by 
predominant tendency, to one or other of these 
classes. We see from what quarter the light enters 
the picture, the rays come in aslant from left or 
right. 

Of historic novels, many of the works of Walter 
Scott, as Kenilworth, afford an example. Of nov- 



THE NOVEL. 273 

els presenting a particular period, or descriptive 
novels, the Hypatia of Kingsley offers an illustra- 
tion. Of the social novel, bringing forward a given 
grade of social life, Mansfield Park and Emma, by 
Miss Austen, may be adduced as instances. Of 
professional novels, having also a national and his- 
torical cast, we find examples in the nautical tales 
of England, as those of Marryat. Pictorial novels 
have all an historic character, though the word, his- 
torical, is more strictly applied to those works of 
fiction in which historic characters appear, thus 
giving the closest attachment of the narrative to 
history. This use of one or more historic names, 
may, after all, be a secondary feature, and the real 
historic element be found in the care and exactness 
with which imaginary facts reflect in their form real 
ones. This they may do very imperfectly under 
the most familiar historic names, and very perfectly 
without such names. That novel is truly historic 
which puts us in living contact with a given phase 
of national life. The pictorial novel is always pri- 
marily presentative in its character whichever of 
the forms it takes. 

The ethical novel belongs to a higher class than 
the pictorial novel. It presupposes this, and adds 
something to it. It seeks historic truth, but more 
than historic truth. It renders life, and at the same 
time renders in it some of its deeper lessons. It 
translates it into an earnest spiritual language. It 
is not content with facts, near or remote, with living 
and veritable persons. Like advanced history, it 
hankers after the philosophy of these facts, and gives 



2/4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

them a definite drift in solution of some of its own 
theories, or ideals, or impressions of society. When 
this is done in a limited way, in the enforcement of 
a particular phase of progress, we have the reform- 
atory novel, of which the Caleb Williams of God- 
win, a writer very deeply imbued with the liberal 
an.d progressive spirit, is an early example ; and 
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Mrs. Stowe, a recent one. 
The narrative, however life-like and real, is made 
to offer a constant mirror to certain conditions of 
society for the sake of the censure and the senti- 
ments thus elicited. A reformatory and satirical 
purpose thus runs through the works of Dickens, 
sufficient, in some instances, to classify the novel, as 
in Bleak-House and Nicholas Nickleby. 

The second ethical novel, the highest novel, 
that of character, makes a study of human life, not 
so definitely in the interest of any one reform, but 
penetratively and profoundly, in view of its many 
issues. This novel is most strictly ethical, as is all 
composition which deals searchingly with the human 
heart. It cannot fail to have a decided moral flavor. 
Dombey and Son by Dickens, Vanity Fair by 
Thackeray, Romola and Middlemarch by Geo. Eliot, 
are illustrations. This ethical tendency, this pre- 
dominance of character, human character, the seat 
of moral life in its thousand phases, each as cer- 
tainly ethical as it is rational, is the leading index 
of power in the novelist. 

All the kinds of fiction of which we have spoken 
are good or bad, as they disclose discreetly and in- 
tuitively, under the drift of the writer's feeling, char- 



THE NOVEL. 275 

acter. This is the crowning quality, and the novel 
is poor without it. In whatever class, therefore, 
the particular work of fiction may stand, it ap- 
proaches this last class according to its excellence ; 
and if no one feature is so predominant in it as this, 
then it falls to this highest division. Thus, Romola 
by Mrs. Lewes, though an historic novel in one as- 
pect, and a descriptive one in another, is rather an 
ethical novel, so pre-eminently is it a study of char- 
acter, of human nature in its deep and permanent 
bearings. To return to a former comparison, the 
landscape, always the same, owes its transient ex- 
pressions to the light and mist and clouds, the float- 
ing unbraided beams of morning, the intense, accu- 
mulated splendor of broken storm-clouds, or the 
brilliant long-lined cirri of evening, fading, trem- 
bling into night. If one of these effects is singled 
out and strongly treated, it classifies the picture 
more than the fields, woods, mountains, which lie 
under this play of the heavens upon them. Yet, 
there is always the scene itself to be studied, and 
so presented, that while we have no hesitancy in 
discerning the wonderful lights and shades at work 
in it, these are all woven into the landscape itself, 
and find their utterance through it. 

A relatively cheap excellence in the novel, are 
the surprises, doublings and rapid evolutions of the 
plot. To be hurried on by events, and exhilarated 
by the mere swiftness of the current as it glides into 
the rapids, is a child's pleasure, and one that with- 
draws the eye sensibly from those many beauties, 
near and remote, which make the voyage profitable, 



276 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

and cause it to linger in the memory as if we had 
floated down a stream on whose enchanted shores 
were grouped, with strange disclosure and divina- 
tion, things past and things to come. A novel of 
adventure is a boy-book, and when we hasten on 
under the excitement of a story, a temper of weak 
and boyish curiosity overtakes us. The ethical 
novel implicates its events in its characters, and 
gives them intensity, as we impart meaning to com- 
mon words, by the impulse put in them. The great 
novelist finds a tendency to cling close to ordinary 
life for it is events like these that are daily unlock- 
ing the souls of men, and startling circumstances 
serve to divert attention from character, to confuse, 
prejudice and overbear its development. The child, 
playing by the pond, scarcely thinks of the wind 
and the water in their constant fellowship and won- 
derful interplay, so interested is he in the imme- 
diate fortunes of his little vessel, its freighting, its 
voyage, and its wreck. In like manner, to mere 
sport, does the feeble novelist reduce the events of 
life, starting his characters, like mimic boats, with 
rudders fixed for the farther shore, righting them 
with the power of a superior deity under the squalls 
and mishaps of the voyage, and directing the eye 
always to the outside action of these empty nonde- 
scripts, and the gallant way in which they reach the 
predetermined port. 

There is no more profound, philosophical and 
moral study than that of the novelist, when he con- 
ceives a character, puts it in action and into inter- 
action with other spiritual entities, like and unlike 



THE NOVEL. 277 

itself; sets, as it were, the varied currents of physi- 
cal, social, intellectual forces, good and evil, at play 
upon it ; and then strives to follow out results, not 
make them, as they flow from the double and com- 
plex causation of the outer and inner world, of the 
heavy yet mobile waters of life, acted upon by the 
invisible winds that come stealing forth from un- 
known spiritual realms. It is only that genius 
which intuitively reads, which intuitively and re- 
flectively unfolds, characters and events, that can 
watch over its creations, and make them disclose 
to duller minds all the forces, above and below, 
that determine their final haven. It is because 
this work is often done in so childish a way, in so 
false and incomplete a way, in so wicked a way, 
that the novel suffers such deserved censure, and 
constitutes a dangerous, wasteful, or vulgar literary 
element. 

No period has equalled our own in this depart- 
ment. Its names stand among the first. This is 
the era of fiction ; Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer, 
Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Lewis, are not likely soon 
to be equalled. The creations of Dickens, out- 
lined with a few strong strokes, almost of caricature, 
united to our sympathies by the abounding humor 
and humanities of the author ; the more carefully 
delineated, but less liked and less familiar person- 
ages of Thackeray, often built up under the cold 
criticism of the writer, rarely evoked under his 
affection; and the men and women whom George 
Eliot brings before us, full of physical and intel- 
lectual life, a life that begets appetites, passions, 



278 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

noble impulses, lending itself to every variety of 
incentive, and disclosing many secret springs of 
conduct ; these are not soon to be forgotten. 

The novel, moreover, is interesting as the field 
in which woman has fought her first literary battle, 
and won her first victory. Here, she stands with 
the foremost. The intuitions of her nature, her 
quick sympathies, and the lively, searching activity 
into which these are called by the daily conditions 
of her being, have made this with her a favorite 
method of composition. 

The newspaper, like the novel, mingles freely 
good and evil in its literary results, with even a 
more decided advantage in general knowledge. 
The quarterly and the daily stand at the two ex- 
tremes of the periodical press as regards time, 
and equally so as regards matter and circulation. 
The dailies discuss those current themes which 
attach to the hour, and few of which extend beyond 
it ; and present the ephemeral news, the mere 
sheen and dust of the marching host. The quar- 
terlies cling to the abstract, theoretical, general ; 
keep thought alive, and return often to those social, 
philosophical, religious principles which are built 
together as the framework of society. The periodi- 
cal assumes an evanescent or permanent value in 
proportion as it approaches the one extreme or the 
other. The periods of gestation in the animal king- 
dom are scarcely more indices of varying strength 
than are the times of return which belong to serials. 
The highest literary influence falls, perhaps, to the 
monthly, equally removed from the slow ponderous 



THE NEWSPAPER. 279 

movement of the review and the rapid execution of 
the journal. 

The startling facts concerning the periodical 
press, are quantity, and, this being considered, 
quality and rate of increase. Though the review 
dates back to the opening of the century, and the 
daily to a period a little earlier, the rate of increase 
has been so accelerated, that the influence of the 
newspaper press may be said to belong distinctively 
to the last forty years, In the United States, the 
circulation was in 1850 twenty-fold that of 18 10; 
in the next ten years it more than doubled, and 
reached in i860 an annual aggregate of nearly 
a thousand million copies. The years intervening 
between this period and the present, have shown 
a corresponding growth. Every age and class 
and calling, and scientific and literary taste, have 
been addressed, each with its own appropriate pub- 
lications. Our time not only stands alone, it is a 
constant miracle to itself in its productiveness. It 
swarms with the ephemera of literature, and only 
the happiest and most diversified mechanical art 
makes passible this creation and diffusion of printed 
matter. The steam-press is a royal instrument, 
and right royally gives to the four winds all that 
the busy mind of man can furnish or crave. 

Though there is much to be deprecated in the 
press, though it imparts a whirl and dizzy rapidity 
to life otherwise unknown, a gossipy and trivial 
character to daily thought ; though it drags to light 
much that should be left in darkness, awakens a 
prurient curiosity, and confounds notoriety with 



280 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

fame, yet as an educating, quickening, propelling 
power, it offers the most peculiar and pleasing feat- 
ure of our time. 

It especially favors the discussion of social, 
reformatory questions. These questions, rife at the 
opening of our century, have multiplied with its 
succeeding years. In minor and graver forms, they 
are constantly coming and going. The newspaper 
press offers the best facilities for the rapid evolution 
and solution and disposal of these problems. At- 
tack and defence, assertion and denial, are immedi- 
ate and from all sides. The entire community is 
sought out by these organs of the press, and held 
to constant deliberation on every question of gener- 
al interest. It at once receives from every variety 
of temper, of interest and of power a corresponding 
form of presentation. The substance of its facts 
and theories is rapidly sifted out, and the results, 
as far as they are practical and tangible, speedily 
reached. The grades of intellectual insight repre- 
sented in these periodicals, from the confident, hasty 
and bold journal, to the cautious, conservative, 
thoughtful review, favor this result ; each accord- 
ing to the light that is in it, taking up, in one way 
or another, the discussion. The effect has been, 
that in England and America, where the press is 
rapid, free, prolific, social questions have lost most 
of their revolutionary power. Any theory, however 
radical, however great and urgent the interests in- 
volved in it, may be propounded and considered 
without endangering or loosening the ties of society 
and government. The latest reform in America, 



THE NEWSPAPER. 28 1 

which has cost mobs and revolutions, was that of 
antislavery, and this seems to have cleared finally 
the atmosphere of those storm elements which 
could not rest till they had filled the heavens from 
side to side with the roar of their ineffectual 
thunder. 

In the United States, the census of i860 gave 
the following ratio, expressing the relation of peri- 
odicals to each other, according to their avowed 
purpose. Eighty per cent, were devoted to politics, 
seven per cent, to religion, seven to literature, and 
six to miscellaneous objects. As politics admits of 
a great variety of secondary ends, the proportion 
of attention devoted to it is not as great as it seems 
to be. The political journal universally unites to its 
partisan purposes the duties of a newspaper; and 
these, save in the crises of politics, are by far its 
greater labor. It is the medium for the rapid treat- 
ment of all passing questions of general interest, 
whether of a scientific, religious or social nature. 

This portion of the press, therefore, more than 
any other, indicates the force held in constant readi- 
ness to circulate theories, chronicle pertinent facts, 
report and enlarge discussion, and in every way 
keep the public mind simmering and seething till 
the moral power of a topic is exhausted. Such are 
the physical and intellectual appliances which a 
free press offers to social progress, and, as a result, 
ten years are frequently more fruitful in England 
and the United States of growth, than whole cen- 
turies of an earlier regime. These two countries 
owe their general exemption from bloody revolution, 



282 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

and that in connection with rapid development, to 
nothing more than to a free, pervasive press, draw- 
ing the innocuous thunderbolt from every political 
cloud. 

The most delicate questions of political policy, 
social police, commercial regulation, of education, 
of religion, and the adjustments of law to exception- 
al territorial conditions, as in Ireland, are constantly 
before the people of England, and peacefully reach- 
ing with each year, a safer, more just and philan- 
thropic solution. So powerfully has this diffusion 
of intelligence through the press, this confronting, 
quickly and thoroughly, every measure with the re- 
sults which social experience and philosophy are 
ready to assign it, this steady exposure of chronic, 
constitutional evil, wrought for progress, that, at no 
time, have the reformatory forces been compelled to 
heap up in sheer violence, and deal physical blows 
against the barriers of truth. 

A second result of the newspaper press, is the 
vigor of public sentiment, issuing more and more 
in its soundness, sobriety and candor. Sprightly, 
racy, incisive, the daily and weekly press must 
be ; this is with it a necessity of existence. Its 
best articles live on the hurried attention of a mo- 
ment, are sandwiched in between courses at the 
breakfast-table, between items of business in an 
active morning, fall to the moments of transfer from 
place to place in lines of labor, or are caught by the 
weary eye at the close of a day's toil. To hold the 
time thus stolen, to improve this opportunity, which 
never returns, to impart a new, a sensible force to a 



THE NEWSPAPER. 283 

mind already spinning on its axis like a whipped 
top, the editorial must be quick, decisive, energetic. 
This demand, so urgent, will not seem to tend at 
once to soundness and soberness of judgment, but 
we believe that these qualities are reached, and in 
a very high degree, by this active observation, this 
continuous and protracted meeting of the varying 
problems of many years. 

A practical sobriety of judgment is a marked 
characteristic of the English and American mind, 
and we believe this is to be attributed, in large part, 
to the rapid business way in which it is called on 
to meet and answer the many questions of the hour. 
The most eccentric judgment, the most remote 
theories are found with those pre-eminently spec- 
ulative. The mind dwelling by itself, suffering 
little contradiction, and giving optical clearness and 
enlargement to its own speculations, is the one that 
wanders farthest from soundness, breadth and 
sobriety of opinion. Extreme as are many of the 
statements current in the press, increasing insight 
and reliability of judgment fall to the veteran 
journalist. Like the business man of many years and 
many complexities, he hits easily and quickly on the 
practically safe course, on the average chances. 
The sins of extravagance and chimera come back 
so often and so surely to vex the guilty for their 
correction and the correction of the public ; journal- 
ism so strengthens the general memory, and so often 
confronts to-day with yesterday, the events of this 
year with the theories of last, that sobriety of 
opinion and practical prudence, become, more and 



284 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

more, the criteria of power. English journals are as 
remarkable for the sober, sure-footed principles they 
bring to every passing phase of life, as for the 
testy, vigorous way in which they are applied. Wis- 
dom, which takes the form of a wide-reaching sa- 
gacity, is an offspring of journalism in an intelli- 
gent, thoughtful community. The severe and con- 
stant criticism to which journals are wont to subject 
each other tends to the same result, brings home 
every mistake, and furnishes the strongest motives 
for its correction. 

This vigor and temperance of thought issue 
also in candor. Notwithstanding all the political 
abuse prevalent, no period has approached our own 
in candor. The numberless occasions for minor and 
larger differences, the rapid changes which public 
sentiment undergoes, and the many instances in 
which unexpected conclusions are reached, concur 
to secure caution of statement and candor of advo- 
cacy, whatever the truth defended. We doubt not, 
moreover, that truth is more sincerely coveted, and 
more quietly enforced now than hitherto, when the 
search for it is so free and uncontrolled, and the re- 
sults to be reached by it in practical life, in society 
and in science, are so momentous. Vigor and can- 
dor and universality of inquiry, do all that can be 
done to call forth in English society the penetration 
and patience, the wise demand and wise conces- 
sion, which leave the social elements to constant 
and peaceful readjustment ; nor do the malice, mis- 
representation and falsehood of the hour, perma- 
nently effect the result. 



THE NEWSPAPER. 285 

Public sentiment, with whatever independence 
and soundness may belong to it, finds also, in times 
of social and political corruption, its most vigorous 
application to the prevalent evil through the press. 
Our own recent history has served to bring this 
redemptive power clearly forth. Exposures, cen- 
sures, measures of redress, incentives to fresh effort, 
have, in our struggle with municipal corruption and 
a wide-spread mal-administration in every branch 
of government, come chiefly from bold, earnest and 
independent journals. These have rallied and 
combined the people in each reformatory move- 
ment, and held the common mind steadily to the 
duty and labor of correction. Journalism, in some 
of its branches, seems likely to rank among the 
most incorruptible of public agents. 

This pervasive power and freedom of the press 
make popular education effective, and at once 
soften and confirm the influence of the pulpit. With- 
out this constant use and enlargement of knowl- 
edge, its mere rudiments are of little avail, and the 
machinery which most diligently awakens the popu- 
lar mind on the greatest variety of themes, and in 
reference to the most practical interests is that of 
the press. The people are kept in movement, are 
put to the use of their knowledge by the newspaper 
above all other agencies. Without this, the rudi- 
ments of education would be of small account. 

The pulpit is liable to become circumscribed, 
rigid and conventional in its methods, except as the 
common mind is stimulated by other intellectual 
considerations, and brings a somewhat independent 



286 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. , 

and critical temper to the Sabbath's discussions. 
The more stern and pressing the necessity laid on 
the pulpit for grounding and regrounding its 
strength in broad, rational and suggestive truth, 
the better for its permanent hold on the people. 
Its prescriptive power and privileges are its greatest 
enemies, those which put its common-sense, its 
vigilance and its piety to sleep. The pulpit is 
helped by the press as an independent rival power ; 
one that has its own standards and brings them to 
bear unsparingly. 

The power of the press emanates chiefly from 
the great cities. These are the seats of its most 
influential organs, not only does the metropolitan 
journal itself have the largest circulation, and that 
among the most intelligent, it exerts a strong in- 
fluence on the weaker journals, scattered through 
the country. The press, therefore, is an assertion 
of the intellectual life and strength of cities, and a 
flowing of it forth over all parts of the land. The 
rusticity and deadness formerly found in country 
and village have largely disappeared, and the re- 
mote citizen is put in daily and living contact with 
the great seats of national activity. There is thus 
a pronounced circulation which, carries the life- 
blood briskly through the body politic, equalizes 
the advantages of position, knits the nation together 
in knowledge, and imparts a common urbanity to 
its members. 

It may be said against this and much more that 
may be urged for the periodical press, that it is in 
large part instrumental, that it is a great whisper- 



PERIODICAL PRESS. 287 

ing gallery, carrying light things and scandalous 
things and wicked things a long way to many ears 
that might otherwise happily have missed of them ; 
that the press is often but the tell-tale mechanism 
of disgraceful national gossip, that has nothing 
whatever to recommend it. Granting freely the 
truth of this and other accusations, still we must 
remember, that village-gossip is better than family- 
gossip, town-gossip is better than village-gossip, 
state-gossip than town-gossip and national-gossip 
than either. Gossip loses something of its bane- 
fulness, obscurity and petty personality and private 
hate at every remove, and the country scandal of a 
low tavern is as much more concentrate, vicious 
and unclean than that of a news-room or county 
paper, as its range is more restricted. Simply to 
get men out of doors, away from the trite, stupid 
vulgarity of their cronies is a great gain. A 
national interest and the air of national intelligence 
make way for national truth, and these for universal 
truth. 

It may also be urged against the press, that 
it gives ready circulation to vice. The accusation 
is most true. Such, however, is not the natural 
fellowship even of news, much less of popular dis- 
cussion. Pestilence may fly on the wings of morn- 
ing, but these more often distil the dewy fragrance 
of abounding life. Publicity is allied to light, and 
favors virtue. Vice, as a rule, has more to gain 
from concealment than exposure. It settles as a 
miasma in dark and secluded places, rather than 
on wind-swept slopes under open heavens. 



288 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

The literary accusation is thought to lie strongly 
against newspaper influence, that it debauches lan- 
guage, introducing questionable words and street- 
phrases, passing them from one grade of literary 
recognition to another, till, forgetful of their low 
extraction, they are able in quiet effrontery to 
usurp good society. Here, too, there is truth in 
the statement ; but the fact expressed by it has 
also its compensations, and by no means unim- 
portant ones. Mere formal criticism, a cold con- 
ventional pedantry, the literary barrenness that 
overtakes letters from time to time, encounter re- 
sistance in the somewhat coarse yet vigorous 
popular appetite ; and language is kept more 
flexible, lithe and nervous, than it otherwise would 
be. The purely literary tendency cannot safely 
be left to itself. It is too overwrought and fini- 
cal. If it is wedded to creative power, well ; but 
when this is wanting, its place may be supplied 
in part by the popular impulse, by the homely, 
changeable, but always lively service to which lan- 
guage is put in the newspaper world. As a 
matter of fact, recent years have been charac- 
terized by a large number of critical works on 
the English language. Some of our periodicals 
assiduously -cultivate style, and many works of 
the present time could be pointed out, which 
show a high popular estimate of pure, simple 
composition. It remains to be shown that the 
language has really been injured by the free- 
dom and license of the popular press. Depart- 
ure at one point from the staidness of ordinary 



PERIODICAL PRESS. 289 

labor no more incapacitates us to return with 
relish to it at another, than does the raciness 
of conversation unfit us for the formalities of 
sober speech. 

One pronounced tendency, which has been with 
us through the entire century, is literary criticism, 
bold, fearless criticism in all departments. This 
is the fruit of the large and varied audience 
which the press gives to every leading work. 
The world's estimate of it, the discrepancies of 
opinion which it calls forth, are as instant and 
inevitable as the sympathetic approval or censure, 
or the divided feeling that runs through the 
gathered multitude, listening around a political 
stand. Aside from systematic and direct criticism, 
aside from that involved in discussion, there are 
many popular writers who, with open, inquiring 
eye, arraign topic after topic before them for 
judgment. Our popular novelists are often of 
this character, Dickens, George Eliot, George 
MacDonald ; and in more general literature, Carlyle, 
Ruskin, Emerson. Such men are personified criti- 
cism, who search all they see. 

The present diffusion of literature, so hopeful 
a sign to philanthrophy, does, indeed, intensify the 
struggle for literary life. In the tossing of the 
multitudinous waves, much floats for a little that 
is of slight value, and works that can ill be 
spared are occasionally engulphed, overwhelmed 
by things more trivial but more buoyant. Com- 
posite tendencies, the half-unconscious conjoint 
movement of many minds, interlocked in their 
13 



29O THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

life, take the place of individual leadership, and 
thus the conditions of progress are removed, more 
and more, from the hands of single men. Some 
pictorial interest, some individual development, 
may seem to be lost in this upheaval, this up- 
rising of the masses, this general diffusion and 
stir of intellectual life ; but an organic, social 
growth, that indicates a conquering force at work 
freely on many minds, is much the more stable, 
and, at bottom, much the more stimulating and 
spiritually interesting, development. 

Moreover, the man of genius finds this com- 
pensation, that his works and words, though losing 
some of their primary, magical force, nevertheless 
enter into the final product with a more intellec- 
tual, free, conscious control than ever before. 
They drop like living things among living things, 
and though their direct, obvious sway is lost, the 
powers really evoked by them are more subtile, 
more pervasive, more permanent than hitherto. 
He who possesses the intelligent popular mind, holds 
the highest, deepest dominion that belongs to 
man. The night suits well with auroral flash, 
but the day, in its accumulated glories, floating 
the sun-beams on a sea of light, as, many and 
divergent, they lie along in tranquil strength, is 
a better image of social joy and life. 



LECTURE XII. 

English Philosophy materialistic. — Bacon, Hobbes. — Cudworth. — 
Locke. — Shaftesbury, Clarke, Berkeley. — Hartley, Priestley, 
Hume, Paley, Bentham, Bain. — Mackintosh, Whewell. — Spencer, 
J. Mill, J. S. Mill. — Reid, Hamilton, Mansel. — Contradiction. 

The present lecture will be devoted to English 
Philosophy, the undercurrent of belief that has up- 
held our intellectual life. England has been re- 
markable, on the one side, for a commercial, prac- 
tical temper ; on the other, for an earnest, inde- 
pendent, religious spirit. Assiduous traffic and 
remote, irresponsible colonization have co-existed 
in each later generation with earnest piety and 
zealous philanthropy. The philosophy of Eng- 
land has had one decided and growing tendency, 
compared with which every other development in 
mental science has been sporadic and transient. 
This prevailing drift of speculation has been on 
the side of material, rather than spiritual interests ; 
though the piety of the nation has steadily held 
it back in the national mind from the logical con- 
clusions contained in it. Religion has waged a 
double war with greedy practical tendencies and 
stubborn speculative ones. The continuous growth 
of English philosophy has been materialistic, 
though the imputation has almost always been 
repudiated, and the last finishing deductions been 
forbidden. 

(291) 



292 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Let us understand our terms. Idealism ulti- 
mately resolves all facts, phenomena, into mental 
states. This has found very little acceptance 
with the English. Realism divides, with the 
strongest lines, mental from physical facts, 
and believes that the mind has sufficient proof of 
both. This must needs be the underlying philos- 
ophy of religion and daily life, though it has 
rarely, aside from the Scottish school, found clear 
statement in England. Materialism, in its com- 
plete form, identifies mental with physical facts. 

Few, in any country, have had the hardihood 
to state and defend it in this, its last position. 
From typical realism to typically complete mate- 
rialism, there is a long and gentle slope, down 
which English philosophy will be found, from 
century to century, slowly sliding. When refusing 
with Spencer to accept either materialism or 
idealism, it is yet fully open to the charge of a 
materialistic tendency, because it is ever over- 
laying the mind with the laws of matter ; subdu- 
ing its true spiritual domain, and subjecting it, as 
conquered territory, to the principles and forces 
of physical science. If this philosophy has not 
poured down headlong like a river. into the morass 
and lowland, it has like a flexible, dissolving gla- 
cier, though seeming to hang on the hill-side, 
slowly crept hither. The glacier, with its gelid 
stream, turbid with the debris of rock it has 
ground to powder in their mountain fastnesses, 
forcing its slow way to the fields and flowers 
below, and disappearing as fast as it reaches 



MATERIALISTIC TENDENCY. 293 

their warmth and life, yet from its frozen, mobile 
centre thrusting forward new masses of ice, is 
a symbol of the unceasing push of materialism, 
grinding along its hard, tortuous way, among the 
beliefs and hopes of men. 

This descent of thought with its reactions and 
exceptions, we wish to mark. We can only do 
this clearly, in so brief a space, by confining at- 
tention to some central point in philosophy, 
some especially significant feature, whose position 
shall serve to determine the changes going on 
about it. Such a feature we find in the origin 
of knowledge, the faculties involved in knowing. 
Realism must hold to two sets of powers, one, 
which receives the impressions of the physi- 
cal world, and, as inseparable therefrom, of the 
mind also — since a sensation has a double aspect, 
pertaining both to mind and matter, involving 
both; and another, which lays hold of, analyzes 
and rationally divides these phenomena, and 
attributes each, under its own laws, to its ap- 
propriate sources. Thus the facts of a certain 
transaction, as, for instance, the firing of a build- 
ing, are perceptively received. The mind then 
inquires, under ideas present to it by its own 
intuitive force, where it occurred, when it occurred, 
why it occurred, and the thought-process therein 
completes itself. Any falling off from this duality 
of the mind, its passivity and activity, its power to 
receive and to use independently, rationally, what it 
receives, is sure to result in idealism or material- 
ism. If the active power prevails, and the mind is 



294 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

set constructively at its own mental facts, if the 
power of logical evolution is made to contain 
and overrule all others, till the material of thought 
is included in the forces of thought, we reach 
idealism. If passivity prevails, if the mind is 
made simply receptive under the play of sen- 
sations, then we steadily approach materialism. 
This has been the bias for centuries of the Eng- 
lish school. It has busied itself in denying and 
belittling the active, original faculties of mind, 
and studiously developing those which turn on 
its sensational, receptive power. We shall make 
this idea, — the source of our knowledge — the 
guiding light of our discussion. If we know 
whence our knowledge comes, we thereby define 
what it is, how far it reaches, and the nature 
of the issues it involves. If it come by the 
senses only, all talk of a spiritual world is delusive 
and visionary. 

Sir Francis Bacon was the pivot on which English 
thought turned decidedly and finally to the physical 
world. The movement, as he proposed it, was 
necessary and most profitable, but, none the less, 
it was partial. He directed attention from deduc- 
tion to induction, from the forms of thought to 
an inquiry into the very subjects and objects of 
thought. This effort favored most decidedly natural 
science. It sought a physical basis for knowledge, 
and opened the senses as its chief avenue. See- 
ing and hearing became the conditions for thinking, 
and the external world suddenly sprang forward in 
study as a rival to the mind. This tendency was 



BACON. 295 

altogether healthy, healthy for philosophy itself, for 
this, too, needed to be reinvigorated by a new hold 
on facts. It is set down by us as the initiative of 
materialism only because it, in turn, became exces- 
sive and one sided. All deductions to be fruitful 
must rest on exact statement, or exact observa- 
tion ; and when the premises have become feeble, 
fluctuating, verbal, remote from the facts they seem 
to represent, then the conclusions are futile and vis- 
ionary. The galvanic current is due to acids in in- 
stant action on metals, a fresh surface of the one 
must be exposed constantly to the dissolving agency 
of the other. So must thought and fact stand 
in constant, living reaction, if the evolved force 
is to be abundant and effective. The world in 
the time of Bacon had few well-established facts, 
its premises were mainly word-facts, and its reason- 
ing, hence, idle word constructions, the chopping 
of logic, logomachy. Yet the bent, excellent in 
itself, which thought received from Bacon, was phys- 
ical, and easily became opposed to true mental 
science, in which other elements play so important 
a part. 

Hobbes is the next name in our sketch, and in 
him materialism is more declared. Indeed, he 
so far overstepped his time, and was so little able 
to support his extreme views, that his influence on 
philosophy lingered a good deal in rear of his own 
opinions. The points at which he gave a decided 
materialistic impulse to thought, were liberty and 
right. He denied the applicability of the notion of 
liberty to the will itself, and affirmed every man 



296 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

free, who is physically free to follow his own 
choices. The choice, itself, like other activities, is 
determined by the influences at play upon it. This, 
the often-repeated view of English philosophy, 
doubly favors materialism. It denies, in its most 
central acts, the original force, spontaneity of mind ; 
traces into and through it those external, physi- 
cal influences which act upon it ; and beholds these 
simply in a new form in its out-going and on-going 
action. Thus the material current is no more 
stayed in its flow by man than by beast, by beast 
than by plant, by plant than by rock. Each modi- 
fies, includes it, and is included by it in a more 
subtile way as we pass upward, that is all. This 
view also favors materialism, because the very idea 
of liberty, an intuitive perception, is denied. Neces- 
sity and chance, its opposite, are all that are recog- 
nized, and human freedom, it is affirmed, must be 
one or the other of these. 

Hobbes, in morals, adopted, in its grossest form, 
the doctrine of utility. This doctrine, always, as we 
believe, false in theory, becomes practically coarse 
and unendurable, or proximately elevated and ser- 
viceable, according to the author's estimate of 
human nature, of its predominating impulses, and 
the circle of its enjoyments. Hobbes held human 
nature very low, and right became consequently 
with him, little more than -the law or ravin of rude 
appetites, the eager assertion of selfishness. Here, 
again, we have materialism, not merely in the 
coarseness which these doctrines assumed, but in 
the denial of that original, ultimate law in our con- 



HOBBES. 297 

stitution, the law of right, which the human reason, 
by its own penetration and with its own power, 
sets up. 

Though the deepening current of English phi- 
losophy, its transmitted and almost national force, 
has lain in one direction, there have always been 
dissenting voices, some of them of clear and start- 
ling emphasis. It is our purpose to speak, how- 
ever, of the schools of philosophy, of its continuous 
lines of development, and to pass, with slight men- 
tion, those side efforts which, oftentimes more 
valuable than the prevailing line of thought, were 
yet unable to secure any general following. It is 
impossible to settle exactly the degree of prevalence 
of any one form of philosophy at any one time ; we 
can only infer that those speculative streams, which 
flow steadily on with enlargements in each succes- 
sive generation, do, for the most part, draw the 
national mind. Yet, even this inference is not 
always correct. 

Next succeeding Hobbes is Cudworth, a fine 
representative of the dissenting tendency. His 
philosophy is Platonic in its cast. A few others 
labored with him, and they represented the older, 
better phases of thought unsubdued to the new 
temper and at war with it. 

The next great name in the line of material- 
istic succession is that of Locke. So full are his 
works, and so influential have they been both in 
England and on the Continent, that modern English 
philosophy dates from him. A philosopher does 
not owe his position exclusively to the novelty, or 



298 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

to the logical force of the views presented, but 
largely to their acceptance as issuing from him, 
their subsequent reference to him, and their historic 
connection through him. Locke gave such an 
enunciation of his view of the origin of knowledge, 
that it entered in a central, germinant principle of 
many subsequent forms of thought. It was just at 
this point, that Locke was peculiarly influential. 
His view became almost axiomatic with his dis- 
ciples. The materialistic philosophy followed his 
lead, rarely stopping to rechallenge his premises. 
We give his opinion in his own words : " Let us, 
then, suppose the mind to be, as we say, white 
paper, void of all characters, without any ideas ; 
how comes it to be furnished ? Whence comes it 
by that vast storehouse, which the busy and bound- 
less fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost 
endless variety ? Whence has it all the materials 
of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in 
one word, from experience ; in that all our knowl- 
edge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives 
itself. Our observation, employed either about 
external, sensible objects, or about the internal 
operations of our mind, perceived and reflected on 
by ourselves, is that which supplies our under- 
standings with all the materials of thinking. These 
two are the fountains of knowledge whence 
all the ideas, we have, or can naturally have, do 
spring."'*" 

He then proceeds more definitely to state the 
sources of knowledge to be two, — sensation, reflec- 

* Human Understanding, B. II. chap. i. sec. 2. 



LOCKE. 299 

tion ; meaning by reflection, the mind's observation 
of its own acts and states, now usually termed con- 
sciousness. 

As Hobbes had called forth from Cudworth a 
strong declaration of the inborn conceptions of the 
mind, so he in turn gave occasion to a staunch 
denial by Locke of innate ideas, and this clear as- 
sertion of experience as the sole ground of knowl- 
edge. The struggle thus opened is not one merely 
of words; whether " innate ideas" expresses well 
or ill our original intuitive knowledge, but whether 
we have any such knowledge ; whether mental 
states are not in their entirety the primary or sec- 
ondary products of sensation. This Locke affirmed 
them to be, and would not grant in thought the 
presence of any element not traceable to the senses. 
Thus time and space, the most obviously super- 
sensible of ideas, he yet refers to this origin. 

The point was clearly put, and vigorously de- 
fended, that the mind contributes nothing to the 
material of thought, but that this is always either 
directly sensible objects, or the states of mind 
which sensible objects have occasioned in it. The 
mind may occupy itself with objects, or with the 
sensations, feelings, these objects occasion ; it can 
go no further. It were truer to the spirit of the 
philosophy to say : These occupy the mind, expend 
themselves on its passive powers, and there repro- 
duce the order and the connections that are in 
themselves. The image is orderly and beautiful, 
because the objects are so which cast it upon the 
screen, — the blank sensorium of the soul. White 



300 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

paper expresses the maximum power in the mind 
itself. The fruits of this philosophy we shall find 
so clearly unfolded at its next step of development, 
that we shall delay their consideration till that is 
given. It belonged to Hume, following in the line 
of succession, to develop this view with a startling- 
consistency and recklessness of consequences. 
Never did a philosophy, that touched daily belief 
everywhere, stand so at war with it, as that of 
Hume. Never did a philosopher inquire in so 
quiet and indifferent a way, what are the conclu- 
sions locked up in his premises, and proceed to open 
them, not stopping to remember, or seeming to care 
that he was dealing with the box of Pandora. 
Though the eye passes at once from Locke to 
Hume in the development of materialism, a consid- 
erable period lies between them, and demands 
some notice, especially for the reactionary efforts in 
philosophy called out by the works of Locke. The 
first of these, following immediately upon Locke, 
was the effort of Shaftesbury to reassert the power 
of the mind, and emphasize anew, especially in 
ethics, its contribution to our judgments. There 
is this change impressed on the phraseology of the 
realists by their controversy with the disciples of 
Locke. They cease to speak of " innate ideas," a 
conception which came from Plato, and defend the 
intuitive powers of the mind. Samuel Clarke is 
next to be mentioned in the line of defense. He 
renewed the a priori argument for the being of God. 
Such force did he attribute to the mind's concep- 
tions that he thought them to carry with them a suf- 



BERKELEY. 30 1 

ficient proof of an external reality, a view quite at 
war with the doctrine that referred all belief to ex- 
perience. He also took up the defense of liberty, 
and attempted to rescue the ethical nature from the 
degradation cast upon it as the enforcement of con- 
ventional motives of interest. He saw in it a 
power by which the mind discerns the " fitness of 
things," and enforces it as a law. 

The most extreme reaction to the Lockian phi- 
losophy, is presented by Berkeley. His point of 
attack was the connection between sensations and 
the external objects to which they are referred. 
The mind was to Locke simply the paper on which 
these images, together with the secondary states 
which they called forth, were received. Thus the 
power of mind stood at its minimum, and the power 
of matter at its maximum. 

As, however, the sensation is known to the 
mind only as a sensation, an image, not at all as an 
external, physical fact, Berkeley denied that there 
was present any sufficient proof of the being of this 
fact to which the sensation had been so confidently 
ascribed. He affirmed that the sensation is to the 
mind a first and final product, and that there is no 
going back of it to some material source, to which 
admittedly the senses can gain no access. Thus 
the mind was instantly divorced again from its 
thraldom to matter, and its own states were con- 
ceived as more wholly its own, and of a more truly 
spiritual nature than ever before. This was an 
adroit turning of the flank of the enemy ; but it 
gave entrance to idealism, so uncongenial to Eng- 



302 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

lish thought. It beat down the old difficulties only 
to raise up as many more new ones. 

Such was the resistance offered to materialism in 
the period between Locke and Hume. It was 
straggling in its character, and tended rather to the 
more rapid unfolding of the obnoxious view than to 
its arrest. In the progress of materialism itself, we 
are brought up to the time of Hume, of Hartley 
and Priestley. Hartley was a little earlier than 
Hume, and Priestley a little later. Hartley's con- 
tribution was made in connection with the associa- 
tion of ideas. This subject had been treated by 
Locke, but Hartley gave it an enlargement, a rigid 
physical development, that made it henceforth a 
characteristic doctrine of materialism. 

If all the material of thought is furnished to the 
mind, thought itself, it might be said, remains. It is 
the mind, after all, that analyzes, compares, unites 
this material, and builds it together in the rational 
structures of thought. This power of the mind to 
institute and order its own processes became the 
point on which the attack was now opened by 
Hartley. Not only is the material of thought given 
it, the very nature and flow of that thought, it was 
said, is determined by the external connections of 
the things which ideas represent. Objects come 
to the mind in sensation, already grouped in place 
and time. The repetition of a sensation, inducing 
in each instance a like physical activity of the brain 
as its condition, tends to make that activity in its 
completeness easy and natural to the organization 
which is subject to it. Such a sensation, returning 



HARTLEY. 3O3 

to the mind without the presence of the external 
object, through this easy proclivity to it already 
induced in the nervous centres by its frequent repe- 
tition, is an act of imagination ; if immediately asso- 
ciated in the mind with its previous presence it 
becomes an act of memory. To the mind as blank 
paper there is now added a receptive, retentive, 
repeating power. 

But these first associations of objects are not 
stable. The same object reappears in many ex- 
ternal connections. The varying history of the in- 
dividual serves also to unite objects in many 
internal collocations of thought and of feeling. 
Moreover, one, two, three or four intervening 
objects may be dropped, and the remainder form a 
new secondary union ; and thus with flexible condi- 
tions the juxtaposition, the association of objects 
is constantly varied, and weaker and stronger con- 
nections of every grade of intensity are formed 
between them. Ideas thus become, through ex- 
ternal connections, through past dependencies, 
through accidental conjunctions, united in various 
ways in the mind, and there, in connection with 
their repeated appearance, gain a certain deter- 
minate power over it, by a tendency fastened on 
the brain to renew its previous states. If by the 
force of a new sensation, any one of these ideas is 
plucked at, it comes up from the depths of the 
mind, like a net secured by a single strand, draw- 
ing after it many others, through various lines of 
attachment. These connections have all been 
woven into the material of thought by the swift un- 



3O4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

observed shuttle of past events, and hence the 
mind is no more indebted to itself for the flow of 
its thought, and the junction of particular ideas, 
than is a river to some presiding deity that con- 
gregates, disperses and arranges its particles. Here 
was a long stride toward materialism. 

A German or Frenchman would have readily 
and quickly taken the shorter steps that remain, but 
the English mind is religious, practical, and will 
hold stolidly fast on the steepest declivities, if a flat 
denial of the ordinary truths of life and morality 
must accompany the descent. Priestley, in farther 
expanding this view of Hartley's, could talk of God 
and duty, when the words were scarcely more appli- 
cable to his psychological mechanism than to a 
power-loom. 

Hume, by far the greatest, and by far the most 
unscrupulous, philosopher in this school of thought, 
was retarded by no such outside considerations. 
With a singularly clear and quiet mind, never to be 
abashed by its own conclusions, he ripened and 
made to burst forth as in a single summer day, the 
thousand winged seeds of mischief that lay hid in 
this one pregnant pod, — this composite thistle-head, 
— that all knowledge is the product of experience. 

We shall give concisely the leading propositions 
of the system of Hume in their order of dependence. 
We do this because of its logical completeness, its 
central position and historical value in English 
philosophy. Opposed and concurrent systems have 
alike been shaped by it. Hume restates the doctrine 
of Locke as regards the origin of knowledge in this 



HUME. 305 

form. The phenomena of mind are divisible into 
impressions and ideas. " The difference betwixt 
these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness 
with which they strike upon the mind."* Impres- 
sions include sensations, emotions ; ideas, " the faint 
images of these in thinking." His fundamental 
proposition is that all ideas are " derived from im- 
pressions which are correspondent to them, and 
which they exactly represent, "f " All our ideas are 
copied from our impressions. "J Thus Hume makes 
those impressions, which we attribute to the exter- 
nal world, echo and re-echo themselves in the mind, 
and these first voices with their receding, fainting 
responses, are all the facts of mental science. 
Hence, as a first conclusion, space and time are not 
distinct ideas, but " merely of the manner or order 
in which objects exist."§ Space and time as we 
accept them are flatly denied, and they are identi- 
fied with that order which they in fact impart and 
explain. Other conceptions are pushed aside in 
like fashion. " The idea of existence is the very 
same with the idea of what we conceive to be ex- 
istent."|| " We have no other notion of cause 
and effect but that of certain objects, which have 
always been conjoined together."^" In this fashion 
is all the original furniture of the mind disposed of, 
and it is left, swept and garnished, for the unob- 
structed entertainment in reflection and re-reflection, 
of those images which date their origin from sen- 
sation only. The next weighty conclusion, there- 

* Hume's Philosophical Works, vol i. p. 15. f Ibid., p. 18. 

X Ibid., p. 99. § Ibid., p. 60. | Ibid., p. 92. *[ Ibid., p. 124. 



306 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

fore, is that " all reasoning consists in nothing but 
comparisons, "* an observation of the agreement or 
disagreement of these fleeting impressions. At this 
point it is, that the theory of Hartley helps out that 
of Hume, for impressions by their very association, 
their reiterations, are made to compare themselves ; 
to sort, locate and put themselves into union, like 
boulders, gravel and sand in a river-bed. 

The next deduction is still more striking. Be- 
lief turns upon the liveliness of the impression and 
hence of the idea. " Belief is nothing but a strong 
and lively idea derived from a present impression 
related to it."f Hume is thus led to admit that 
belief is a thing of sensation rather than of thought. 
In his own words, " Belief is more properly an 
act of the sensitive than of the cogitative part of our 
nature. "J A good echo is audible, a weak one is 
not ; a lively idea is believable, a feeble one is not. 
The mind has no more agency in its own beliefs, 
than the ear in the sounds it receives ; a clear 
voice can be heard, an obscure one cannot. The 
notion of continued, distinct, external existence, as 
that of our own personal identity, is due entirely 
to the imagination. This acquires a certain ten- 
dency, a kind of momentum, by which it reproduces 
objects not present in sensation, and leads us to 
believe therefore in their continuous being. The 
upshot of this system is absolute skepticism. For 
nothing is a subject of belief, that is not at the 
moment vividly impressed on the mind, and every- 

* Hume's Philosophical Works, vol. i. p. ioo. 

f Ibid., p. 140. X Ibid., p. 233. 



GROUNDS OF BELIEF. 307 

thing that chances to be so impressed, is worthy, at 
least for the moment, of acceptance. Belief neces- 
sarily shifts like the shadows of each passing day. 
The noonday light of belief, — that is, of vivid impres- 
sion, — travels round and round the earth, but it 
tarries nowhere ; and each position is in turn over- 
taken by the darkness and shadows that follow hard 
in the rear. Argument, knowledge, is a barren 
transfer of the mind from point to point ; the men- 
tal, like the physical, eye takes in new views only 
to lose old ones. He says, " The skeptic still con- 
tinues to reason and believe, even though he 
asserts that he cannot defend his reason by rea- 
son."* The weary traveller travels by a fatality 
of unrest without hope or real joy. Nothing can 
exceed the candor of Hume's conclusions. He says, 
" I have already shown that the understanding, 
when it acts alone and according to its most gener- 
al principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not 
the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition, 
either in philosophy or common life. We save 
ourselves from this total skepticism only by means 
of that singular and seemingly trivial property of 
the fancy by which we enter with difficulty into re- 
mote views of things. "f That is to say, the vivid- 
ness of ideas is constantly changing, therefore 
nothing is worthy of permanent belief. We must 
give ourselves in floating fancies to the impression 
uppermost, and lucky is it that we drift on so very 
slowly. Out of this fortunate sluggishness of our 
faculties, by which they hold at least for a little the 

* Hume's Philosophical Works, vol. i. p. 237. f Ibid., p. 330. 



308 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

impressions made on them, spring the congruity and 
order of daily life ; near and passing impressions 
having this advantage, that they are at harmony 
with themselves. We are indebted to our dulness 
for what we seem to know. Hume touches on his 
own feelings under these irrefragable deductions, 
" The intense view of these manifold contradictions 
and imperfections in human reason, has so wrought 
upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to 
reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon 
no opinion even as more probable or likely than 
another."* His farther pursuit of philosophy was 
a mere matter of pleasure, therefore, and diversion. 
Hume did not stop with these purely speculative 
results ; he touched on all sides practical questions, 
the immateriality of the soul, miracles, future life. 
He denies the possible proof of miracles, legitimate- 
ly enough from one view of his doctrine, strangely 
enough from another. He starts with referring all 
knowledge to experience, this knowledge, in its most 
solid form, a miracle contradicts ; very well, but has 
not our philosophy issued in the conclusion that all 
belief is a question of liveliness of ideas ? Those, 
therefore, who accept miracles, show by this very 
fact a belief grounded on ideas sufficiently vivid to 
occasion it, and thus to justfy them in it. Thus 
Hume cannot be more rational in denying miracles 
under his ideas, than are his opponents in accepting 
them under the impression present to' their minds. 
In short, a philosophy that makes it absurd to hold 
fast to any conclusion, cannot destructively criticise 

* Hume's Philosophical Works, vol. i. p. 331. 



HUME. 309 

any opinion ; for one opinion is at least as good as 
another, and vindicates its right to be by the mere 
fact that it exists. That I hear a voice, proves to me 
the being of the voice. 

The practical conclusions of Hume's philosophy, 
self-destructive as they were, were, nevertheless, 
very nettlesome to the religious and philosophical 
world, and called forth, on the one side, farther ex- 
pansion, and, on the other, more systematic attack. 
We will turn first to affiliated views. It may be 
asked, why should the system of Hume, and those 
systems in continuation of his, be called materialis- 
tic, when they do not so much as decide on the 
existence of the external world ? We answer, be- 
cause their whole constructive force is derived from 
the sensational side of our being. Sensations which 
represent matter and material law, control mind, 
completely subordinate it to the fixed, necessary 
forces or tendencies contained in them. This is 
the sense in which we say of Hume, of Spencer, 
they are materialistic. 

In ethics, the utilitarian view has been defended 
by Paley, Bentham, Bain. Paley was an able 
writer on the proofs of Christianity, yet bases his 
ethical system on the skeptical, materialistic view 
of obligation. He found in his spiritual philos- 
ophy, no higher inspiration, no weightier law for the 
duties of ordinary life, than came to Hume in abso- 
lute unbelief, generalizing a transient law of action, 
from the unsubstantial fleeting facts afloat about 
him, — the gains and losses that fall to us under 
them. The belief and unbelief of England often 



3IO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

strike hands on this question of morals, intimate as 
it is to daily life and character. 

Bentham is most remarkable for bold, dogged 
assertion, English-wise. One might think the 
question of the foundation of obligation in morals 
had ceased to his mind to be one of abstruse in- 
quiry, and was regarded as a point involving good 
sense and veracity, to be disposed of by positive 
averment, so contemptuous is he of his adversary. 
He settles the question as one Englishman says of 
another, with " a masculine, muscular, graphic, nar- 
row, thick-headed ability." 

Bain is the latest, most elaborate and thorough 
defender of utilitarian morals. 

His works are to be read with great advantage, 
though the reading should be accompanied with 
the most complete dissent. English morals, though 
muddy and murky with the soiled sediment of self- 
interest, have their commercial value. The river 
Thames, vexed and turbid, though not much as a 
mirror of the heavens, floats a deal of shipping, and 
is every way a godsend to trade. English philoso- 
phy has worked hard at the utilities involved in 
ethics. Yet, it is a pity that one's home should be 
lighted with ground-glass, not because he cannot 
thus see the dinner on his table, but because he 
loses the long range of vision of the outside world. 
A law of morals that is deduced shrewdly from pas- 
sing events may give a good deal of successful 
guidance in daily life, but we cease to discover in 
it the far-reaching light of eternity. ^Esthetics 
has shared these sensual limitations of ethics in 



MORALS. 311 

England, and beauty has become, as to Jeffrey and 
Alison, the fruit of associations fleeting and acci- 
dental. 

The opposite view of morals has also had its 
defenders, but their works have been less united, 
less the part of a system, and have possessed 
secondary power over the national mind, at least 
as represented in the agents of progress. Chief 
among these defenders, should be put Sir James 
Mackintosh and of later writers, Whewell. The 
former had the support which sprang from his con- 
nection with Scottish philosophy, the only contin- 
uous speculation, aside from materialism, that con- 
stitutes, on British soil, a school. 

The philosophy of Hume has found its '::ie of 
descent to our own time through James Mill, John 
Stuart Mill, and Spencer. The philosophy of 
Spencer is essentially an independent, vigorous re- 
construction and re-argumentation of the doctrines 
of Hume ; though, it must be said, with far more 
belief and consequently with far more momentum. 
The novelty of impression which begot such skep- 
ticism of his own conclusions in the mind of Hume, 
seems, in consistency with the theory that iteration 
breeds conviction, to have disappeared on farther 
familiarity, and the assertions of Spencer have ap- 
parently a very sufficient and undoubted hold on 
his own mind. Every reader of the two philoso- 
phies must be struck with their general identity, 
and with the fact that the germ of the one is wholly 
contained in the other ; and yet with this great di- 
versity of conviction between them. Their agree- 



312 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

ment is not the general agreement, that both refer 
knowledge to experience, but a close correspond- 
ence of secondary propositions. Thus, the evolu- 
tion of the ideas of space and time is similar, 
though the discussion of Spencer is more patient 
and complete. Their resolution of all knowledge 
into resemblance is the same; also their reference 
of belief to what may be called the sensational, 
physical hold of ideas on the mind ; their assertion 
of an inability to affirm anything of the existence of 
the external world, of mind and of God, or of the na- 
ture of any of them. Both alike deal only with im- 
pressions, and the ideas or states of mind directly 
consequent upon them, and thus wholly identify 
physical, social, mental events in their evolution, 
their law of progress. To this evolution Spencer 
has devoted much time in very fruitful labors, 
and has chiefly used his philosophy as an in- 
strument in this field of inquiry. Evolution in man 
and in society is with him only a more complex, 
physical process than that which has from the be- 
ginning proceeded in inorganic and organic matter. 
Between Hume and Spencer, lie the works of 
two powerful minds in close sympathy with them. 
The Mills, in vigor of thought, worthily stand be- 
tween the two. The leading work of James Mill is 
an Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. 
He gets much the old start in sensations, and in 
ideas the lingering traces of sensations, and, under 
the fruitful law of association, proceeds to develop 
these into imagination, memory, belief. The road 
is one which many feet have travelled from the time 



MILL. 313 

of Locke, till it has become the beaten path of sen- 
sationalism, each succeeding investigator bringing 
new relations and a little new light to its details. 

The leading philosophical work of John Stuart 
Mill is one on logic, the inductive logic, which he 
strives to establish to the exclusion of fundamental 
truths, — of deduction as primitive proof. Therein, 
and in many other ways, he shows his adherence to 
the school whose development we have briefly traced. 
(1) The initial feature of it is sensation as the ex- 
clusive source of knowledge. (2) From this follows 
the resolution of mental facts into floating phenom- 
ena, united only by laws of association ; (3) phenom- 
ena, from which nothing in any direction can be 
predicated concerning real being. (4) One ulti- 
mate relation includes all others, that of resem- 
blance ; while (5) belief is the transient force of 
existing connections in the mind. (6) Every idea 
that will not accept this solution is denied, or modi- 
fied or falsely referred. These conclusions may be 
reached in different forms or partially missed. 
They are none the less in the system. To these 
John Stuart Mill added (7) induction or observa- 
tion as the complete, exclusive source of proof. 
This also is undeniable, if experience is our only 
means of knowledge, and all knowledge is expressed 
under resemblances ; for induction is the union 
by experience of agreeing things and facts. For 
inductive logic, Mill has done much, and here lies 
his chief merit. The deductive logic, however, re- 
turns instantly to us as the moiety of a complete 
system, when we recognize intuitive truths. 
14 



314 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

It remains now only to speak of the opposing 
Scottish school, immediately called forth by Hume, 
and whose chief philosophers were first Reid, last 
Hamilton, with Stewart and others associated with 
them. 

Reid took his appeal against the conclusions 
of Hume afresh to the common-sense, or common- 
consciousness of the race. He claimed anew the 
intuitive force of the mind, and strove to lead by 
means of it to a fresh view of the doctrine of 
perception. Locke and Hume had neither of them 
any means of establishing a belief in the external 
world. There are two ways by which this space 
between mind and matter, sensations and the 
objects to which they pertain, can be bridged 
over. The sensation can be regarded as exclu- 
sively a mental fact or state, and then, by the 
idea of causation, referred to external being as a 
source or cause ; or the sensation may be regarded 
as a conjoint product in which both mind and 
matter are present and directly recognizable. 
Neither explanation was open to the philosophy 
of Locke. He did not accept the intuitive act 
of mind by which it reaches the cause in the 
effect, he could not, therefore, pass from the 
sensation to a real exterior source of it. Neither 
did he find in the sensation itself two constitu- 
ents which the mind immediately perceives. He 
accepted the traditional view of perception, that 
it is a detached state confined wholly to the 
mind itself. His philosophy had then no method 
of establishing the being of matter. Reid and 



REID. 315 

Hamilton have both labored at length this doc- 
trine of perception. Reid's appeal to the common- 
sense of men, was taken without sufficient an- 
alysis, and hence bears a dogmatic character. He 
has left it uncertain, whether he regarded sen- 
sation itself as a direct contact with the exter- 
nal world, or whether it is instantly completed 
by an intuitive action of the mind, and the 
reference of effects to causes becomes the medium 
by which this union is effected. We suppose him 
to have obscurely held this last view. Hamilton 
ascribes to him the first. Hamilton maintained 
staunchly, and, as it seems to us, very mis- 
takenly, the doctrine of immediate, direct knowl- 
edge of physical objects in perception. 

The Scottish school, more especially Hamilton, 
while far in advance of the Lockian philosophy, 
was most unfavorably affected by it, and was un- 
able to construct a consistent, complete system. 
We feel more inclined to censure than to praise it. 

The action it assigns the reason, the central, in- 
tuitive faculty of the soul, is very insufficient. The 
division recognized by Coleridge, of the sense, the 
understanding and the reason, is more fertile in 
growth than the entire philosophy of Hamilton. 
We make complaint of inadequacy against this 
philosophy, and of limitations cast upon it by pre- 
vious thought, at many points. Hamilton and 
Mansel are both enslaved by the idea of the con- 
ceivable and inconceivable, the imaginable and 
unimaginable, as setting the limits of belief; and, 
on this ground, reject, as against the insight of 



316 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

the reason, a knowledge of the infinite. Here, 
they are virtually back in the old slough of sensa- 
tions, and ideas their shadows, as the sum of 
knowable things. 

Again, the idea of causation does not arise with 
Hamilton from the power of the mind, but from its 
impotency rather, its inability to think or conceive 
a thing into nonentity. Here he is practically 
with Hume, and makes causation a notion fastened 
upon us by the imagination, instead of a cardinal 
fruit of the reason. Once more, having thus re- 
moved the idea of causation, he strives to make 
sensation do its work, and affirms us to be directly 
conscious of matter and mind. This, we believe, to 
be pure assertion, thrown in to help out the self-con- 
stituted weakness of his system. Having closed 
up the door to the real being of mind and of mat- 
ter, he makes this rent in the wall to supply its 
place. The doctrine is plausible only because sen- 
sation is a complex process which results in a knowl- 
edge of the outside world, and, falsely looked on 
as a single, simple act, may be said directly to reach 
that result. 

The drift of English thought down through 
Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, Hume, J. Mill, J. S. Mill 
and Spencer, we have seen to be steadily toward 
materialism. The chief resistance has been offered 
by the religious convictions of the nation. It is 
these that have made the word, materialist, oppro- 
brious, and one which few of the school have been 
willing to accept. 

The reluctance of this school to admit the 



CONTRADICTIONS. 2) l 7 

adjective, materialistic, while struggling to make 
absolute and universal those necessary connections 
which are the characteristic of the physical world, 
and the complete expression of physical force, is 
but one of its inconsistencies. It is true, the pos- 
sibility of strict materialism or strict idealism has 
been lost to it, since the existence of matter and 
mind are both unproved ; but the appearances with 
which this philosophy does occupy itself, are, in 
every one of their connections, those ascribed to 
physical being. Though the floating facts of our 
experience are only film deep, in the depth and 
coherence that do belong to them, they are fixed, 
necessary, and hence, in essence, physical. 

This philosophy also started with a predilection 
for induction, and later, through Mill, declares this to 
be the sum of logic. Yet no system has been 
more exclusively deductive, more in the face of all 
experience, than that of Hume, who, after all, is 
the central -mind of the school. Start with his 
simple, assumed premise, the nature of knowledge, 
and every subsequent step is evolved with almost 
the exactness and the freedom from observation 
which belong to mathematics. 

Again, this philosophy, so purely deductive, so 
skeptical of the very being of the external world, 
strikes hands with natural science as its coadjutor, 
and stands in close affinity with it. Religion, on 
the other hand, as over-speculative, and dealing with 
unsubstantial ideas, it censures and shuns. This 
from a philosophy that has to do with images only, 
and cannot transcend the merest film of being in 



3l8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

any direction ; that confessed in its corypheus, that 
its pursuit was a question of pleasure merely ! 
Contradictions and inconclusiveness can scarcely 
go farther. If all is dream, one should certainly be 
left to dream the dream most pleasant to him. A 
philosophy of dreams, what has it to do with sci- 
ence ? It should stand affiliated with any easy 
wayward thought ; if that thought be either brilliant 
or consoling. 

There is in this development of the English 
mind, especially if we regard the ethical bearing of 
the points in discussion, a slow, sedimentary set- 
tling of commercial sentiment and principles which 
turn on a sense of present well-being from among 
the loftier, more lucid and spiritual elements of 
thought, and their patient, half-mechanical com- 
bination into those stratified products, those grow- 
ing deposits of successive generations, known as 
sensationalism. Indeed, if the system be true, this 
is rather an exact physical, than a figurative state- 
ment of the process. This philosophy is strictly a 
resultant habit, a slowly acquired chronic tendency 
of brain, depositing and completing its beliefs in 
residuary fashion from age to age. 

We trust that the implied half of the simile will 
also prove true, and that the clarified waters above, 
the elements relieved of this sordid contact, will be 
only the more thoroughly and brilliantly permeated 
with the light of Heaven, that direct light, which 
the reason of man mediates to the human soul. 

THE END. 



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i. 

HTHE STUDENT'S ATLAS OF PHYSICAL GEO 
1 GRAPHY, 

Consisting of 20 Maps with descriptive Letter-press, illustratec 
by numerous engravings. Glasgow and New York. Imp 
Svo, cloth extra, $2.25. 

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-^ A new, comprehensive and useful Atlas of Modern 
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about 40 Maps. Glasgow and New York, 1872. Imp. Svo, 
cloth extra, $4.00. 

in. 
EW MERCANTILE MAP OF THE WORLD, ON 
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For Merchants, Shippers, Ship Owners, etc. Size 55 
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The following are the leading features of this Map : — 

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The recognized Steam and Sailing Routes to and from the principal 
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The principal Overland Telegraphs, Submarine Cables, and male 
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The Currents of the Ocean, with arrows showing their Course, are 
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The Northern and Southern limits of Icebergs and Drift Ice are also 
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cloth case for library, $10.00. 



N 



IV. 



FOR REFERENCE, LIBRARIES AND FOR FAMILY USE. 



THE IITEMATIOIAL ATLAS, 

Geographical, Political, Classical and Historical, 
consisting of 65 Maps, 35 of Modern Geography, showing all 
the latest Discoveries and changes of Boundaries, and 30 of 
Historical and Classical Geography, with descriptive Letter- 
press of Historical and Classical Geography, by Wm. F. 
Collier, LL. D., and Leonard Schmitz, LL.D. 

CONTENTS. 

INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY, by W. F. COLLIER, LL.D. 
INTRODUCTION TO CLASSICAL GEGGRAPHY, by LEON. SCHMITZ, LL.D. 



MODERN GEOGRAPHY. 35. 

1. THE EASTERN AND WESTERN 

HEMISPHERES. 

2. THE WORLD, (on Mercator's Pro- 37. 

JECTION.) 

3. EUROPE. 

4. ASIA. 

5. AFRICA. 
NORTH AMERICA. 39. 
SOUTH AMERICA. 
ENGLAND AND WALES. 40. 

9. SCOTLAND. 
JO. IRELAND. 41, 

11. FRANCE. 

12. HOLLAND AND BELGIUM. 42, 

13. SWITZERLAND. 

14. SPAIN AND PORTUGAL. 

15. ITALY. 

10. SWEDEN AND NORWAY, DEN- 
MARE AND THE BALTIC. 44. 

17. GERMAN EMPIRE. 

18. AUSTRIA. 45. 

19. RUSSIA. 46. 

20. TURKEY IN EUROPE & GREECE. 47. 

21. INDIA. 

22. PERSIA. AFGHANISTAN, AND 48. 

BELOOCHISTAN. 

23. TURKEY IN ASIA. 

24. CHINESE EMPIRE AND JAPAN. 

25. ARABIA, EGYPT, NUBIA, AND 

ABYSSINIA. 

26. PALESTINE. 49. 

27. DOMINION OF CANADA. 50, 

28. 28a, 286. 28c. UNITED STATES. 51 
WEST INDIES AND CENTRAL 52. 

AMERICA. 53. 

30. AUSTRALIA. 54, 

31. VICTORIA. NEW SOUTH WALES, 55; 
AND SOUTH AUSTRALIA. 56. 

32. NEW ZEALAND. 57. 
58. 

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY. 59, 

60. 
BRITAIN UNDER THE ROMANS. 61. 
BRITAIN UNDER THE SAXONS. 



HISTORICAL MAP OF THE BRIT- 
ISH ISLANDS, from A. D. 1066. 

FRANCE AND BELGIUM, illus- 
trating British History. 

ROMAN EMPIRE, Eastern and 
Western, 4th CENTURY. 

EUROPE, 6th CENTURY, showing 
Settlements op the Barbarian 
Tribes. 

EUROPE, 9th CENTURY, showing 
Empire of Charlemagne. 

EUROPE, 10th CENTURY, at the 
Rise of the German Empire. 

EUROPE, 12th CENTURY, at the 
Time of the Crusaders. 

EUROPE, 16th CENTURY, at the 
Eve of the Reformation. 

GERMANY, 16th CENTURY, Re- 
formation and Thirty Years' 
War. 

EUROPE, 17th and 18th CENTU- 
RIES. 

EUROPE AT THE PEACE OF 1S15. 

EUROPE IN 1871. 

india, illustrating the rlse of 
the British Empire. 

WORLD, on Mercator's Projec- 
tion, showing Voyages of Dis- 
covery. 

CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 

ORBIS VETERIBUS NOTUS. 

^EGYPTUS. 

REGNUM ALEX AND RI MAGNI. 

MACEDONIA, THRACTA, &c. 

IMPERIUM ROMANUM. 

GR.ECIA. 

ITALIA, (Septentrionalts.) 

ITALIA. (Meridionals. ) 

ARMENIA, MESOPOTAMIA. &c. 

ASIA MINOR. 

PALESTINE, (Temp. Christi.) 

GALLIA. 

HISPANTA. 

GERMANIA, &c. 



WITH A COPIOUS INDEX. 



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TTHE STUDENT'S ATLAS OF CLASSICAL GEOG- 

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■*■ 16 Maps, with Questions on each Map. 

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2. Countries Mentioned in the Scriptures. 10. Journeys of the Apostle Paul. 

3. Canaan, in the time of the Patriarchs. 12. The distribution of the Prevailing Kelig- 

4. Journeviugs of the Israelites. ions of the World. 

6. Dominions of David and Solomon. IS. The Tabernacle, Camp, &c. 

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8. Palestine in the time of Christ. 15. Ancient Jerusalem. 

16. Modern Jerusalem. 

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